In the 45 years that Adam Neumann has been alive, he was in control of the co-working giant WeWork for only about nine of them. In 2019, after hatching a plan for an initial public offering that was so disastrous he was soon forced out of the company, Neumann was able to finagle an extremely lucrative golden-parachute deal in exchange for going away — except he did not go away.
For years, he plotted his way back into a residential version of his office-space business, called Flow, backed by Andreessen Horowitz. Then, earlier this year, WeWork descended into bankruptcy and Neumann saw his chance to get it back. “It has been challenging for me to watch from the sidelines since 2019 as WeWork has failed to take advantage of a product that is more relevant today than ever before,” he said last year. In February, he made a big splashy announcement that he would be buying back WeWork with the help of hedge-fund billionaire Dan Loeb. The only problem with that was that Loeb, the CEO of Third Point, wasn’t really involved, and the company didn’t want to sell it to him.
Now, Neumann is conceding something that has been clear for months: He’s not going to get WeWork back. “For several months, we tried to work constructively with WeWork to create a strategy that would allow it to thrive,” he told the New York Times’ DealBook. “Instead, the company looks to be emerging from bankruptcy with a plan that appears unrealistic and unlikely to succeed.” As the Times points out, a bankruptcy court had wiped out about $4 billion in WeWork’s debt as the company negotiated its leases with landlords. This gave the company the kind of financial breathing room it needed so it wouldn’t be forced to take a deal with Neumann — which, given the fact that it was never seriously entertained, it didn’t want to take.
Would another go-around at WeWork actually have been good for WeWork? Remember, Neumann once defined WeWork’s mission as “elevating the world’s consciousness” in securities filings for Wall Street investors. Neumann once got the world to value his company at $47 billion, just a few years before a deflated Silicon Valley bubble and the pandemic would all send it crashing down. Maybe he was hoping to prove to the world that all that money wasn’t just a fluke and he still had some of that magic. Maybe he does, but he just won’t be able to pull off another trick at WeWork.
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