WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann says one car ride with SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son set off WeWork’s $47 billion collapse; the $4.2 billion deal signed on an iPad; the walk back to office when his ego took over
Work co-founder Adam Neumann says he can point to the exact moment his $47 billion company started to come apart, and it came years before the failed IPO. He traces it to a car ride through Manhattan with SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son in late 2016, a meeting of roughly half an hour that ended with a $4.2 billion investment offer signed on an iPad.Speaking to host Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO podcast, in an episode released on September 28, Neumann said that deal changed how he saw his company. Son got out of the car near 54th Street, and Neumann walked the 36 blocks back to WeWork’s headquarters. “Every step that I take, it goes higher and higher. And by the time I walk into HQ, 18th Street, I forgot what we were all about,” he said. “It suddenly became about the money.“
A 12-minute lobby chat with Masayoshi Son turned into a $4.2 billion SoftBank deal
The night before, WeWork’s board had agreed that Neumann would raise a modest $300 million to $400 million, slow down growth, turn a profit and then take the company public.Son, short on time before a meeting with then President-elect Donald Trump, spent just 12 minutes in WeWork’s lobby before asking Neumann to keep talking in his car. The number started at 3billionandkeptclimbinguntilitreached”4.2 to be exact,” as Neumann recalled on the podcast. Both men signed the terms on an iPad. SoftBank’s investment, announced the following year, eventually totalled $4.4 billion.
Adam Neumann admits WeWork grew faster than he did
WeWork peaked at a $47 billion valuation after SoftBank added another $2 billion in January 2019. Losses kept piling up, including a $1.9 billion net loss for 2018.Neumann pointed to a flaw in the model: WeWork signed long leases in expensive cities and rented desks to members on short commitments. “We were taking long-term commitments against short-term commitments,” he told Bartlett.He was just as blunt about himself. “Adam wasn’t ready, and if the founder is not ready, the business is not ready,” he said.
WeWork went from a $20 billion buyout offer to bankruptcy in five years
Neumann also revisited a 2018 plan for SoftBank to buy WeWork outright at a $20 billion valuation. A special board committee pushed for $32 billion, and Son pulled out in December 2018 as SoftBank’s own shares slid.When the IPO prospectus landed in August 2019, investors balked at the losses and Neumann’s grip on control. The listing was shelved and he stepped down as CEO that September. He said he went “from 13,000 employees to three employees in one week.”The pandemic emptied offices in 2020. WeWork filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2023 with nearly $19 billion in debt. Neumann tried to buy it back in early 2024, but the company came out of bankruptcy without him.
Adam Neumann is building Flow on the lessons of WeWork’s fall
Now 47, Neumann says he measures success by how he expects to feel at the end of his life. Of the most successful people he knows, he said, “I have not seen one that got happy or fulfilled from attaining a number or a material thing.”He is taking that thinking to Flow, the residential real estate startup he launched in 2022 to bring a sense of community to renting. On the podcast, Neumann said Andreessen Horowitz has invested $470 million in Flow across its Series A and B rounds, and his family has put in $350 million of its own. He added that Flow’s software tracks profitability down to the building, floor and corner, something WeWork’s systems never managed.Despite all of it, Neumann insists he has no regrets. “I am so happy that they happened because they made me exactly who I’m meant to be,” he said of the hardest years. “Falling is not bad. The thing that’s bad is not when you fall, it’s how you get up.”
