By Bryan Beach
WeWork spent much of 2018 working on its big initial public offering (“IPO”). Everything about it was unusual, starting with the company’s S-1 – a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission prior to going public. S-1 documents are typically bland, black-and- white financial snoozers... But Neumann’s wife Rebekah hired the Vanity Fair director of photography to shoot magazine-grade snapshots for WeWork’s S-1. Neumann himself figures prominently in the document – with the word “Adam” appearing 169 times. (To put that in perspective, the wildly popular messaging company Slack recently filed an S-1 that only mentioned its CEO 19 times). The Wall Street Journal reported that Neumann invited the heads of the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq out to his Hamptons estate and told them that if they wanted the WeWork listing, they would have to ban meat and plastic in their cafeterias. Neumann’s neurosis wasn’t limited to WeWork... He told friends he would run for “president of the world,” that he wanted to live forever, and had ambitions of being “the world’s first trillionaire.” WeWork never did go public. And Neumann-bashing has become a bit of a national pastime. But Neumann is not the only character in the story... There’s also Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son (often referred to as “Masa”) and a bunch of rich Saudi investors. Masa, importantly, is CEO of Japanese banking colossus SoftBank and
Adam Neumann’s buffoonery has been the gift that keeps on giving... especially for those of us who write about markets for a living.
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In the past year or so, the disgraced CEO of office-space peddler WeWork has provided endless questionable moves to critique from the cheap seats. Delighting in the downfall of Adam Neumann has become passé. The jokes have been made... The mud has been slung... The pithy tweets have been tweeted. But today I’m going to tell you what we can all learn from the WeWork mess and why you should be more like Adam Neumann in this market environment. Done correctly, the WeWork business model works just fine. The company enters long- term leases for office space, gussies it up, and rents it out on a short-term basis. It’s certainly not innovative, but the model has been proven by various companies over the past few decades.
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American Consequences
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