Photo: lev radin (Shutterstock)
Adam Neumann fooled a lot of people, but not in a criminal way. Neumann’s WeWork, founded in 2010, has a boring business model—it’s essentially a commercial real estate company that rents office space to other businesses—but Neumann’s flamboyant style and the cultural zeitgeist of 2010 America combined to make WeWork seem like a paradigm-shifting, tech-centered, disruptive, buzzword, buzzword, buzzword. Rich people lined up to invest, even after Neumann said WeWork aimed to “elevate the world’s consciousness” (through renting people cubicles, I guess.) Before the cracks appeared, WeWork was valued at $47 billion.
Eventually, it all fell back to earth. Sources say WeWork’s board asked Neumann to step down as CEO because of his “drug use,” “eccentric behavior” and his leadership, which led the company to burn through $2 billion in 2018 alone. The company lowered its valuation to around $10 billion, people were laid off, and WeWork was taken over by its largest investor, Softbank.
(The world’s consciousness was largely unaffected by any of this.)
