And then Adam’s startup was worth $47 billion
Adam Neumann (Jared Leto, left) and business partner Miguel McKelvey (Kyle Marvin)
Those: Apple TV +
The charismatic Adam Neumann became a billionaire with the start-up WeWork. However, his business idea to revolutionize the world of work failed because of his ego. A new series tells the incredible story.
NJust because someone who has a good idea gets megalomania on the way to the top doesn’t mean it was a bad idea. Adam Neumann was the founder and CEO of WeWork, a company that wanted to develop and shape the future of work.
After a spectacular financial crash of the start-up, which had meanwhile been valued at 47 billion dollars, Neumann left for a rumored severance payment of 1.7 billion dollars. Now the story has been made into a series, starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway as Neumann’s wife.
The story of WeWork, the company, is pretty dramatic – but the story of Adam Neumann, the founder, is completely insane. The Israeli grew up with his mother and sister on a kibbutz for a few years. After military service, he moved to New York to study there. Neumann noticed that the extroverted yet friendly nature of the tall man who loved to talk gave him a large circle of friends who were pampered with parties and billions of dollars from high-profile investors.
The original approach of offering jobs for the self-employed and young companies was not new back in 2008, when a precursor to WeWork started. However, Neumann managed to combine the principle of coworking with a good story – and with emotions: hopes, dreams and longings. A whole living environment was to be created around a socially and communicatively networked workplace, including schools and apartments. In this way, Neumann and his entourage managed to rise to a rocket-propelled company, fueled by money that Neumann recruited from investors.
At the same time, things got out of hand. Neumann and his wife, Rebekah, lived lavishly while speaking publicly about making the world a better place with WeWork. The cult surrounding the founder went hand in hand with a catastrophic management style. On top of that, WeWork described itself as a technology company, but in fact only prettified perfectly normal office properties with an ultimately empty philosophy.
Dynamic duo: Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto as Rebekah and Adam Neumann
Those: Apple TV +
A good idea – improving the working world – had become a bugbear from which Neumann and his entourage primarily benefited. The bubble burst when investors realized shortly before the planned IPO that a large part of the business model was just a facade.
WeCrashed is a series inspired by the WeWork story (available on Apple+), which in turn is based on a podcast. Sold as a love story, the eight episodes repeatedly focus on the Neumanns’ marriage. Rebekah, a cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow, reportedly told Adam on their first date that he was “full of shit”. That didn’t stop her from marrying the persuasion artist Adam, having five children with him and enriching the WeWork story with a number of absurdities.
That’s well told, the staging captures the perversion of entrepreneurship as well as the exaggeration of the brave new world of work and is played with appropriate exaltation by the leading actors Leto and Hathaway. “You know you’re not God,” says Adam’s business partner, Miguel, in one scene. “But you have to admit,” Adam then says, “that I look a little like him.”
Addendum: WeWork finally went public last year with a significantly lower valuation than at its peak. Investors like SoftBank had already put so much money into the company that they didn’t want to let it go under. Of course, Neumann had already left by then, but still held shares in WeWork. Most recently, he invested in real estate in the USA.
“WeCrashed” can be seen on Apple+.