WeWork: the latest news about 2019’s soap opera of a company

Co-working office space provider WeWork has filed for bankruptcy covering its locations in the US and Canada, and in a filing, it said it had liabilities of between $10 and $50 billion.

It’s the latest turn for a company that went from being valued at $47 billion in January 2019 to unsuccessfully attempting an IPO later that year.

Apple’s television adaptation of the podcast adaptation of the real-life soap opera that was WeWork now has some major talent attached. Jared Leto, the soon-to-be leading vampire of Morbius, and Anne Hathaway, are joining the Apple TV Plus series WeCrashed as Adam and Rebekah Neumann, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

WeCrashed takes its name from the Wondery podcast it’s based on, detailing the meteoric rise and fall of the real estate company that billed itself as a technology company. Many of WeWork’s problems (and, presumably, the plot of the show) were centered on the Neumanns. Adam Neumann was described as a risk factor in the S-1 documents released before the company’s IPO, and a profile of the Neumanns in The Wall Street Journal didn’t do much to dissuade anyone that they weren’t completely out of touch. For example, Rebekah Neumann reportedly fired multiple people because she “didn’t like their energy,” and Adam Neumann apparently had plans to become “president of the world.”

The business of business is rarely a pleasure, but sometimes it gets very juicy. Last year, the story of WeWork — its improbable rise and totally predictable downfall — was the juiciest: it had everything from a cult-leader, grifter chief exec to a laundry list of downright wild business practices (like leasing property directly from said grifter CEO). And what timing!

The document that sunk ‘em was WeWork’s bonkers S-1 filing, which precedes an initial public offering and which actually began with these utterly meaningless sentences: “We are a community company committed to maximum global impact. Our mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness. We have built a worldwide platform that supports growth, shared experiences and true success.” It is truly wonderful to see an entire company so high on its own farts. But there was something missing — the story of Rebekah Neumann, WeWork’s shadow co-founder and wife of CEO Adam Neumann.

WeWork was 2019’s soap opera of a company, and its story was so wild that it will be the focus of a second TV series, Variety reports.

The second series will be developed by Apple and the showrunner of Apple TV Plus series Little America, according to Variety. (Disclosure: Little America is adapted from a series by Epic Magazine, which is owned by Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.) The series will be based on David Brown’s WeCrashed podcast from the podcast network Wondery.

The last chapter of the WeWork saga closed with our hero — its founder, Adam Neumann — being ousted from his company (with a payout of $1.7 billion) and loosed upon the world. Its next chapter opened with a question: is the business sustainable? The answer is still unclear. Employees across WeWork are organizing in the face of massive potential layoffs, as the company began to divest itself of its “non-core” business; they couldn’t get T-Mobile chief John Legere as their new CEO. In the midst of all this wreckage, which is slowly burning out, we’ve had a few Neumann sightings of our own. He was last seen jetting off to Israel two days before Christmas.

Neumann, however, has recently resurfaced. As The Real Deal reports, the former executive just listed his six-bedroom triplex penthouse in Manhattan for $37.5 million, which is a couple million more than he paid for it in 2017. Because our protagonist is a legitimate billionaire, this doesn’t matter so much; he’s got properties from the Bay to the Hamptons.

Turning around the mess that is WeWork isn’t going to be up to John Legere. According to CNBC, the current T-Mobile CEO does not intend to take the chief executive role, despite rumors earlier this week that WeWork was strongly pursuing him. 

Legere “has no plans” to depart T-Mobile as it nears completion of its merger with Sprint, CNBC says. Both the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission have greenlit the combined mega-carrier, but it still faces one final challenge: numerous state attorneys general are attempting to block the deal with a lawsuit. 

Earlier this week, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son said that it was a mistake to have invested in WeWork, and shared a “simple” three step plan to turn around the company, which included dumping side businesses that aren’t profitable. Well, it seems like that might be happening soon, as WeWork has published a “90-day game plan” that divests itself of those non-core businesses and includes internal layoffs, as first reported by CNBC.

Here are the businesses that WeWork says it is going to get rid of. One is a company that makes wave pools.

WeWork — sorry, The We Company — is in freefall, and has been since its disastrous attempt to go public earlier this year. The co-working company’s S-1 filing revealed a whole bunch of chicanery, mostly in service of enriching Adam Neumann, its founder and CEO. Neumann’s bad behavior, however, has come with an immense human cost: he had thousands of employees beneath him, and after an emergency takeover by SoftBank, the company’s largest investor, their livelihoods are now in jeopardy. (Neumann himself is walking away from the flaming wreckage with more than a billion dollars.) Because of that, some We Company employees have decided to band together and demand the company treat them humanely through what is sure to be a tough restructuring.

As the WeWorkers Coalition, the group sent an open letter to their company’s management that at once acknowledged the grim reality of their situation and also the We Company’s future. “Thousands of us will be laid off in the upcoming weeks. But we want our time here to have meant something,” they wrote. “We don’t want to be defined by the scandals, the corruption, and the greed exhibited by the company’s leadership. We want to leave behind a legacy that represents the true character and intentions of WeWork employees.” That legacy includes demands for a seat at the decision-making table, more transparency and accountability, more diversity, and more serious investigation into sexual misconduct, among other reasonable requests.

SoftBank leader Masayoshi Son admitted that it was a mistake to have invested in WeWork, the beleaguered office space rental company that’s been in chaos ever since an attempt to go public revealed systemic mismanagement and ludicrous behavior by its founder and CEO.

During an earnings conference, Son said that WeWork’s troubles resulted in “quite a large impact” on SoftBank and its Vision Fund. “My judgement in investment was not right in many ways,” Son said, according to SoftBank’s translator, adding that he regretted the decision.

WeWork has apparently started the process of making a gaming division, according to a trademark filing and job applications found by Bloomberg. WeWork has applied for a trademark for “Play By We” in the UK, and information in the trademark filing suggests the division could be e-sports-focused. As summarized by Bloomberg:

This potential e-sports focus is backed up by a job application Bloomberg found for a “Content & Experience Manager,” who would help “conceive and execute a strategy to integrate the new business in the current eSports gaming universe.” Bloomberg also found a Play by We job listing for a project manager role.

WeWork and SoftBank have announced a deal that will see the Japanese tech giant buy out around 80 percent of the beleaguered real estate company. Marcelo Claure, the former CEO of Sprint — which SoftBank acquired in 2012 — will be the new executive chairman at WeWork. Adam Neumann, the founder and CEO who is receiving more than a billion dollars to leave, will become a “board observer” without voting power. Artie Minson and Sebastian Gunningham remain co-CEOs of WeWork.

SoftBank is already WeWork’s largest investor, to the tune of more than $10 billion. The new deal includes $5 billion in further funding, $1.5 billion that had already been pledged for the future, and a $3 billion tender offer for existing shareholders outside SoftBank. WeWork claims, however, that SoftBank won’t have a majority of voting rights at any company meeting, making it an “associate” rather than a subsidiary.

Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank is taking control of WeWork, and it’s giving WeWork founder Adam Neumann the equivalent of nearly $1.7 billion to sever most of his ties with the shared office space startup, according to The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. SoftBank will also spend up to $3 billion buying out shares owned by employees and early investors in the company, and it’s lining up some $5 billion in debt financing to help the startup move forward. This is all on top of the more than $10 billion SoftBank has already committed to WeWork as its largest investor.

Neumann will reportedly sell $1 billion worth of his WeWork stock to SoftBank as part of the takeover bid. SoftBank will also pay him a $185 million “consulting fee” and will extend him a $500 million line of credit, the Journal reports. The board of directors of the We Company — WeWork’s parent company — reportedly chose SoftBank’s deal over a competing bid from JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Listen, don’t worry about Adam Neumann, who was just ousted as the CEO of The We Company; first of all, he’s still the non-executive chairman of The We Company. Besides, entrepreneurs are like vampires: unless you put a stake through their heart, they’ll come back. (Just ask Travis Kalanick, who’s claiming his next act will be “bigger than Uber.”) Neumann will be fine. The better question is if We will be fine. Another good question is if SoftBank, We’s biggest shareholder, will be fine.

For those of you who are wondering what the hell is going on, welcome! The brief version of events is that The We Company — the company formerly known as WeWork — was about to go public and put out a bunch of paperwork. That paperwork revealed, all in one place, the following things: that Neumann was renting his own buildings to The We Company, that Neumann had secured loans from The We Company, and that to change its name to The We Company from WeWork, the company paid for naming rights from… Adam Neumann. It kind of started to feel like the point of The We Company, lofty language about “elevating” one’s “consciousness” aside, was just to give Adam Neumann money.  

WeWork founder Adam Neumann is stepping down as CEO of The We Company, The New York Times is reporting. Neumann is expected to remain with the shared office startup as chairman, but he will reportedly give up majority control of the company, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Neumann is leaving his post after a roller-coaster summer where his startup went from being one of the most highly valued companies on the planet to shelving plans for an initial public offering. Neumann came under fire after the company’s prospectus filing for the IPO revealed heavy losses and a wide discrepancy in the distribution of power between him and the company’s other shareholders. The filing also shed light on some of Neumann’s alleged self-dealing, including the fact that he had trademarked the name “We” and then licensed it to his own company.

The Verge’s newsroom lights up every time a new WeWork story hits because it’s legitimately one of the wildest companies we’ve ever seen — and we’ve seen some wild ones. (We once went deep covering a company that made a $700 Wi-Fi-connected juicer, which now seems infinitely quaint by comparison.) For one of the best stories you’ll read all year, you must visit The Wall Street Journal today, where Eliot Brown published a captivating profile of Adam Neumann, the CEO and founder of The We Company.

The world has been learning a lot about Neumann’s extraordinary family antics since his failed attempt to IPO for $40 billion. As my colleague Liz Lopatto wrote last month, WeWork is less of a tech company and more of a soap opera. But thanks to today’s story from the Journal, we know a lot more about that soap opera’s plot. Here are just some of the incredible details from the WSJ:

On August 14th, The We Company (the company formerly known as WeWork) filed its mandatory S-1 paperwork to go public, and it’s worth reading in full. I mean, forget the serious stuff for a moment. The thing begins with an epigram: “We dedicate this to the energy of we — greater than any one of us, but inside all of us.”

The energy of we. I get it from a branding perspective — they’re literally calling themselves The We Company — but, you know, normal people would just say “our energy.” I tease Silicon Valley’s tech companies a lot, but New York easily matches them in ego. Look at these kids, literally bending the English language to their will!