I have already covered the myth that Adam Neumann – the Israeli jewish co-creator of coworking space rental firm ‘WeWork’ alongside Miguel McKelvey – invented coworking spaces. (1) However, it is worth noting that Neumann’s time at ‘WeWork’ massively enriched him – to the tune of circa $2 billion – (2) and he conveniently bailed out of ‘WeWork’ as soon as his latest stock market IPO failed in 2019.
The easiest way to explain this is to reproduce Brittany Nguyen’s timeline from her article on the fall of ‘WeWork’ from ‘Forbes’ in November 2023: (3)
‘2010 - Cofounders Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey opened the first WeWork in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City, allowing anyone from freelancers to large businesses to rent office spaces and desks.
December 2014 - WeWork closed a Series D funding round of $355 million, which led to a company valuation of $5 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported.
2016 - Neumann met Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank Group Corp., which eventually led to SoftBank committing $3.1 billion in new funding for WeWork in 2017, the Journal reported.
2017 - WeWork opened its 200th location in Singapore—adding to its global collection of coworking spaces including in New York, São Paulo, London, and Seoul—and reached a $20 billion valuation after raising a $760 million Series G round.
January 2019 - SoftBank led WeWork’s Series H funding round which raised $1 billion—totaling SoftBank’s overall investment into the company at $10 billion—and valued WeWork at $47 billion.
August 14, 2019 - WeWork publicly filed for an IPO, but its filings showed large losses, such as a $1.9 billion loss on $1.8 billion in revenue in 2018 according to CNBC, and a $690 million loss on $1.5 billion in revenue for the first half of 2019, Insider reported.
September 24, 2019 - Neumann stepped down as CEO amid scrutiny from WeWork’s board members and investors over his leadership—including allegations of self-dealing—and financial problems, after the company delayed its IPO the previous week and reduced its estimated market valuation to $10 billion from $47 billion.
September 30, 2019 - WeWork submitted a request to federal regulators to withdraw its IPO plans, with co-CEOs Artie Minson and Sebastian Gunningham, Neumann’s replacements, saying the company wanted to “focus on our core business, the fundamentals of which remain strong.”
May 18, 2020 - SoftBank CEO Son, who invested over $10 billion in WeWork and pushed its valuation from $17 billion to $47 billion, said he was “foolish” for the firm’s investments, and valued WeWork at $2.9 billion, CNBC reported.
May 2021 - WeWork lost $2.1 billion in its first quarter of the year according to the Financial Times, which pointed to the coronavirus pandemic and a settlement between SoftBank and Neumann, who sued the bank for trying to back out of a $3 billion deal to buy shares of WeWork from its earliest employees and Neumann.
October 21, 2021 - WeWork went public at a $9 billion valuation after merging with special purpose acquisition company BowX Acquisition Corp., and saw its shares rise 13% despite filings showing the company was losing billions of dollars.
August 2022 - WeWork said its offices reached pre-pandemic occupancy levels—72%—after a heavy drop during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, when many members decided to work from home and canceled their rental contracts with WeWork, Bloomberg reported.
August 8, 2023 - WeWork said its losses and negative cash flows were giving the company doubt about its ability to continue operating, warning of a possible bankruptcy in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
September 6, 2023 - WeWork announced its plans to renegotiate “nearly all” of its leases by leaving “unfit and underperforming locations” and reinvesting in better-performing markets to cut operating costs and continue running “for many years to come.”
November 6, 2023 - WeWork filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and its stock fell to 84 cents a share, giving it a $44.5 million valuation.’ (3)
To summarize this briefly: Neumann and McKelvey launched ‘WeWork’ in 2010 and conducted their first round of fundraising – not included in Nguyen’s timeline - from the Hasidic jewish real estate billionaire and venture capitalist Joel Schreiber to the tune of $15 million for 33 percent of ‘WeWork’. (4) Schreiber’s capital investment was the first of many large intakes of investor cash successfully courted by Schreiber who handled the capital and management of the business, while McElvey was the ‘Chief Creative Officer’. (5)
Then between 2014 and 2019 ‘WeWork’ took in between $10-20 billion in external investment largely from Japan’s ‘SoftBank’ and when ‘WeWork’ filed its IPO on the stock exchange in August 2019; Wall Street’s analysts had realized that they had been had by September 2019 with Neumann officially departing ‘WeWork’ soon after on very favourable terms – although he had been planning this since at least 2016-2017 - leaving ‘WeWork’s’ employees and investors to drown in tens of billions of dollars of debt and himself with a billion dollar fortune.
As Nguyen explains:
‘WeWork has $15 billion worth of assets but $18.6 billion in debt, according to the Wall Street Journal. It also reportedly owes almost $100 million “in unpaid rent and lease termination fees” to real-estate companies and property owners it worked with. Neumann stepped down from leading WeWork after its failed IPO filing revealed details about potential conflicts of interest that former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told the Journal are “so egregious,” including an entity controlled by Neumann selling the rights to the “We” family trademarks to the company for $6 million, though Neumann eventually changed his mind. Neumann said in a statement that watching WeWork’s fall since he left the company in 2019 “has been challenging,” noting that the coworking space startup “has failed to take advantage of a product that is more relevant today than ever before.” Meanwhile, CEO David Tolley said in September the company has tried to pivot from a “period of unsustainable hypergrowth.”’ (6)
Tim White has further detailed just how much Neumann personally profited from all these goings on at ‘WeWork’ in his recent article for ‘Finance and Society’ as follows:
‘Before examining Adam Neumann’s new venture, it is important to return to what happened at WeWork: the capital he amassed and funneled during his reign of the company and amid the protracted process of dethroning him. Important context for this was the outsized shareholder voting rights held by Neumann via WeWork’s dual-class share structure. Neumann’s ‘super-voting’ rights gave him 10 times the voting power of ordinary shareholders and 65% of votes on any company matter (Molla, 2019). This meant he could engage in major transactions at the highest level with hardly any board involvement and was very expensive to get rid of (they had to pay a lot to remove his voting rights). This was emblematic of a broader trend in the founder control of US tech corporations in the unicorn era of 2014–2022, where VCs thirsty for a mammoth exit granted founders unprecedented power to win the best deals (Kampmann, 2025).
Leveraging his founder control, Neumann relentlessly enriched himself and pursued personal business interests whilst at the helm of WeWork. He cashed out $700 million of his own shares when WeWork’s valuation was soaring, and used his shares as leverage to secure loans (Edgecliffe-Johnson, 2022). Most notably, JP Morgan, along with UBS and Credit Suisse, facilitated a $500 million personal line of credit secured by Neumann’s WeWork shares (Tan and Basak, 2019). Neumann famously trademarked ‘We’ and sold it to WeWork for $6m (he later repaid this) (Molla, 2019). He used WeWork as a vehicle to invest in a series of companies that aligned with his personal interests, such as an artificial wave pool start-up and superfood venture (Leskin, 2019). Neumann also directly made numerous (angel) investments while acting as WeWork CEO, including in a Pinterest knock-off, a co-working/hotel provider, a British energy start-up and an Israeli medical marijuana company (Leskin, 2019). In 2019, when WeWork’s valuation was at its peak and Neumann’s own wealth – on paper – hit $13bn, he set up his family office 166 2nd Financial Services (Edgecliffe-Johnson, 2022). By 2022 this would be staffed with 50 people in New York and Miami, and would have invested in some 50 start-ups, from a mortgage provider to a company applying artificial intelligence to in vitro fertilization (Edgecliffe-Johnson, 2022). So Neumann leveraged WeWork as a vehicle to become a prominent venture capitalist in his own right, funneling his personal and corporate wealth into a plethora of companies.
Whilst WeWork CEO, Neumann also channeled his capital into real estate. The Neumanns spent over $80 million on at least five homes (Nguyen, 2022). More importantly, Neumann purchased stakes in buildings that WeWork was leasing or planning to lease. This included a 50% stake in an 11-story New York City building, and Neumann being the main investor in a real estate firm leasing properties in San Jose to WeWork (Bastone, 2019). The Wall Street Journal uncovered that between 2016 and 2017, WeWork had paid $12 million in rent on buildings partially owned by Neumann (Brown, 2019). We see here how, from the start, Neumann was leveraging his tech capital to attain real asset wealth. From the earliest days of WeWork, he was already ‘exiting’.
It was, however, when Neumann was dethroned that he extracted, and subsequently funneled, the most eyewatering sums. Given his founder control, when Neumann became such a PR problem that he was eventually ousted from WeWork, the process of disentangling him from the firm would prove complex and costly. In total, Neumann received $1.7 billion USD from the fallout (Pham, 2019). This included SoftBank buying out most of his shares for 578 million, a non-compete agreement of 185 million, a settlement payment of 106 million, consulting fees totaling 92.5 million, and a 500 million credit line to repay loans (Helmore, 2021). As corporate governance scholar Charles Elson commented at the time, ‘The captain rammed the ship into a bridge and then was given the value of the ship to leave’ (Helmore, 2021). At this point, whilst the papers continue to focus on the story of failure, Adam Neumann has leveraged his power over WeWork to become a billionaire and venture capitalist. This strategic rechanneling of his WeWork riches – and proven track record of ruthless self-enrichment – would, ultimately, make him ripe for reinvestment.’ (7)
Put simply: Neumann was engaged in a classic ‘pump and dump’ stock market scheme – similar but far cleverer than Vivek Ramaswamy’s far more famous get-rich-quick scheme – (8) whereby he conned investors out of billions of dollars, siphoned off a significant amount of the cash for himself and shoveled the reset into ‘WeWork’ to keep the hype going and attract even more investment capital.
Then when his scheme faltered, he used the almost insanely favourable contractual terms of his employment – a contract he’d basically written himself – to almost immediately exit ‘WeWork’ with billions of dollars and with ‘WeWork’s’ employees and investors carrying the can for his new-found wealth.
Essentially Neumann ran a multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme and committed a sophisticated form of securities fraud that should be illegal but probably exist in one of those weird legal grey areas that hedge funds and corporate raiders often live in and exploit to their advantage.
Yet rather than being hanged by a righteous mob from a lamp post outside the New York Stock Exchange Neumann has gotten off scot-free thus far and has in fact reinvented himself as a real estate billionaire and ‘mega-investor’ with the help of the jewish-run venture capitalist firm ‘Andreessen Horowitz’. (9)
One rule for jews, one rule for the goyim: no?
References
(1) On this please see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-invention-myths-coworking
(2) Extrapolated from: https://www.forbes.com/profile/adam-neumann/
(3) https://www.forbes.com/sites/britneynguyen/2023/11/07/weworks-rise-to-47-billion-and-fall-to-bankruptcy-a-timeline/
(4) https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2017/10/19/the-little-trick-weworks-adam-neumann-uses-to-charm-investors/
(5) Idem.; https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67349615
(6) https://www.forbes.com/sites/britneynguyen/2023/11/07/weworks-rise-to-47-billion-and-fall-to-bankruptcy-a-timeline/
(7) Tim White, 2026, ‘The non-death of Adam Neumann: Alt-exiting, serial-founding, and failing up in Silicon Valley venture capital’, Finance and Society, First View, pp. 2-3
(8) https://www.forbes.com/sites/willskipworth/2023/08/18/vivek-ramaswamy-sued-by-former-employees-claiming-his-company-pressured-them-into-violating-securities-laws/; https://drgregmaguire.org/2023/08/28/the-pump-and-dump-scammer-vivek-ramaswamy/
(9) White, Op. Cit., pp. 1; 3-4
Sounds like a Ponzi scheme to me. But WTF do I know?
once you get to look at the high rolling financial fraudster criminals you cannot help but to trip over jews..