WeWork

On August 14, 2019, The We Company filed to go public. The cover of its prospectus carried a black "we" logo ringed by the names of nine banks, and disclosed that its high-vote stock carried twenty votes a share and that Adam Neumann, its co-founder and chief executive, would control a percentage of the voting power left blank in the filing. The next page was a dedication: "WE DEDICATE THIS TO THE ENERGY OF WE – GREATER THAN ANY ONE OF US BUT INSIDE EACH OF US."

"Our mission is to elevate the world's consciousness," the filing said.

Neumann and Miguel McKelvey had opened the first WeWork in early 2010 at 154 Grand Street in Manhattan, offering shared workspace to members who, the filing said, consisted mostly of freelancers, startups and small businesses. SoftBank invested $4.4 billion in 2017 at a valuation of about $20 billion, and another $2 billion at the start of 2019 at about $47 billion. By June 30, 2019, the company counted 528 locations in 111 cities and 527,000 memberships. Its net losses were $0.4 billion, $0.9 billion and $1.9 billion for 2016, 2017 and 2018.

Investors "balked at the $47 billion private valuation," the company would later tell a bankruptcy court. On September 24, 2019, Neumann said "the scrutiny directed toward me has become a significant distraction" and stepped down as chief executive. The offering was withdrawn on September 30. In October SoftBank committed $5 billion in new financing and a tender offer of up to $3 billion at $19.19 a share, which it tried to call off in April 2020, a move WeWork contested. Neumann was to become a board observer.

WeWork went public anyway in October 2021, through a merger with the SPAC BowX at an equity value the company put at about $9.5 billion. On November 6, 2023, it filed for Chapter 11 in New Jersey with about $4.2 billion of funded debt. Many of its leases, chief executive David Tolley declared, carried "above-market rents and fixed annual rent escalation without rent resets or lessee-friendly termination rights."

"It has been challenging for me to watch from the sidelines since 2019," Neumann said that day. He later bid to buy the company back — more than $500 million, Bisnow reported. The plan that took effect in June 2024 instead gave Yardi Systems about 60% of WeWork in return for $337 million of the $450 million it needed to exit bankruptcy.

Neumann's new company, Flow, was valued at about $2.5 billion in 2026, Florida Trend reported. That April the influencer Nuseir Yassin and his girlfriend, Aija Mayrock, posted a video that the magazine said was really a promotion for Flow Brickell, Neumann's 632-unit apartment tower in Miami: a gym, a sauna, a cold plunge, a class strumming ukuleles. "It's like community living," Mayrock says in it, "where everyone in the building is chasing the same dreams."

Sources for this story