As WeWork goes bankrupt, its founder Adam Neumann is enjoying the sunny climate of Miami, where the golden beaches are paved with billionaires.
Neumann, 44, was the flamboyant leader of the office-sharing company whose meteoric rise was supposed to change the way we worked in offices.
But the American-Israeli entrepreneur was ousted from WeWork amid a failed initial public offering in September 2019, leaving the company on a downward trajectory that ended with its bankruptcy announcement this week.
And now, with morale at WeWork “horrible,” according to staff, Neumann is doing just fine, The Post can reveal.
He’s skateboarding, socializing, and seeking investors for another startup that he believes will reshape the world (this time how we live at home), telling them, “I’m a creator, not a destroyer.”
He is still worth an estimated $1.7 billion, and sources tell The Post that he lives in South Florida with his wife, Rebekah, and their six children.
The Neumanns are close friends of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump and their children.
Jared, Ivanka and their three children live just 10 minutes away on the posh Indian Creek Island after purchasing a $30 million ‘top repair’‘.
The Neumanns spent the summer at their Amagansett home, next door to Rebekah’s cousin, Property of Gwyneth Paltrow – and have now settled in the exclusive Bal Harbor Marina neighborhood.
They tell us they can be found hosting social gatherings with friends. A friend from Bal Harbor added: “Adam and Rebekah are a big part of the Jewish community.”
Another Bal Harbor source added: “Adam skateboards all the time, all over town, taking business calls. Everyone runs into it; he is very friendly. He stops and jokes with people.”
Meanwhile, Rebekah, 45, has been “off the grid” after the WeWork debacle and has stayed out of the spotlight. One person who knows her called her “a force of nature…that’s for sure.”
In 2021, Neumann purchased two properties for $44 million in an off-market deal from local investor Joseph Imbesi.
The deal included two parcels of land spanning 50,000 square feet, where Neumann planned to build a 14,500-square-foot mansion for his family, as well as 360 feet of waterfront and multiple boat slips at the marina.
“From a lot of people’s point of view, you never bet against Adam, he’s always the one who wins, because the world sucks,” a former WeWork employee told The Post.
“Adam has cleaned up his image, participating in panel discussions and giving speeches. He appears very modest, very humble and has learned from his mistakes. But I don’t think he learned his lesson at all.
“I know him personally, he’s a very, very good salesman and he knows how to take advantage of things.”
For the past few years, Neumann has focused on his latest startup, Flow, which received a $350 million investment from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, with mega-investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, giving it a valuation of $1 billion in August 2022, and that’s before it even began trading.
The company says it will build rental communities that foster a sense of ownership and community.
Neumann has taken ownership of at least six apartment buildings he already owned in Florida and Nashville, Tennessee.
Speaking with CNBC “Squawk Box” Last month from Saudi Arabia, where he courted potential investors at a conference called “Davos in the Desert,” he boasted: “We’ve been talking to some of the largest Fortune 500 countries on the planet and their needs have changed, but the ” “The need for people working together, the need for community has never been greater.”
But, one former WeWork employee noted, after two years, there’s still nothing more than a landing page for Flow.
“No one really knows what they are doing, other than trying to reinvent the residential market. So he bought some properties and managed them, but a lot of people do that,” the one-time confidant said.
“Adam has $1 billion and $300 million in real estate, he wants to be the next big disruptor and prove he can do what he didn’t do with WeWork. But he hasn’t done it yet, so he’s probably frustrated and has a lot of real estate in his hands.”
Neumann’s story was turned into the Apple TV+ show “We Crashed,” starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway.
But as always, nothing is as strange as the truth.
At the height of the WeWork boom, the Neumanns spent nearly $90 million purchasing six properties, according to The Wall Street Journal.
They included a townhouse in Greenwich Village, a $35 million Gramercy complex (the Neumanns bought four of the building’s seven units), a 60-acre farm in Westchester, New York (featuring a waterfall, a tennis court tennis and a horse riding trail), two properties in the Hamptons and an 11-acre property just north of San Francisco, complete with a guitar-shaped living room, a swimming pool, a three-story water slide, a spa, a racquetball court, an orchard and “a spellbinding series of narrow windows[ing] the opening chords” of a Grateful Dead song.
They have since sold the San Francisco property, the New York townhouse and the Westchester farm. The Gramercy house is still on the market.
There was a $60 million Gulfstream G650ER, even though, according to the 2021 book “The Cult of We,” a charter company, Gama Aviation, alleged that Neumann’s passengers spit tequila on each other and didn’t tip the passengers. crew. .
And the The Wall Street Journal reportedIn 2018, when a private plane carrying Neumann and his entourage landed in Israel, the crew discovered a box of cereal containing marijuana.
Apparently, the plane’s owner was so alarmed by the discovery (the drugs had crossed foreign borders) that he had the plane stopped, leaving Neumann and his friends without transportation back to New York.
There were loud, lavish corporate retreats, while Rebekah, who was given the title “chief brand and impact officer” at WeWork, reportedly became known for firing people if she didn’t like their energy.
Then there was Neumann’s 40th birthday extravaganza, a three-week trip that ended with him inviting two dozen friends to a beachside resort in the Maldives, while Rebekah invited friends like Jared and Ivanka to Italy to celebrate her 40th. birthday.
in 2019 vanity fair In the story, a staff member reported that “Rebekah fired a Gulfstream mechanic from WeWork…because she didn’t like his energy.”
WeWork filed for bankruptcy protection in the United States on Monday, after its bets on companies using more shared office space soured.
The move represents an admission by SoftBank, the Japanese technology group that owns about 60% of WeWork and has invested billions of dollars in its turnaround, that the company cannot survive unless it renegotiates its costly leases in case bankruptcy.
The former employee said: “Everyone has seen this coming for a good 6 to 12 months, everyone is getting money but the morale is terrible. There is no corporate culture and everyone just watches the stock go down, down, down.
“People have been cashing paychecks and waiting for the company to blow up; the original version of WW is completely gone.”
On top of this, the bankruptcy leaves WeWork’s owners fearing being left with empty spaces they can’t fill in a terrible market.
Speaking to CNBC, Neumann said he had learned his lesson from WeWork. He said he had been inspired for his new business by his childhood on a kibbutz in Israel, and by the fact that many people aged 30 or younger can only afford to rent.
In language eerily similar to his WeWork hype, he said: “Bringing people together and building community has always been what we’re about and what I’m about.
“The most important word in our partnership is alignment, and we are very aligned with our views around the world, we are very aligned with our moral standards and we are very aligned with what we want to build.
“Flow is another iteration of the same story, which is when people live in community, when people live together, when people obviously have differences, but they actually find something to share passions, they find a way to share businesses, there is always a common ground. “
In a statement about WeWork’s bankruptcy, he He described it as “disappointing.” watching the company collapse that he had been watching from “on the sidelines” since 2019, accusing current management of not “taking advantage of a product that is more relevant today than ever.”
“I believe that with the right strategy and team, a reorganization will allow WeWork to emerge successfully,” he said.
He didn’t mention that he could actually make more money from bankruptcy, unlike the company’s bondholders.
His agreed exit from the company included a $430 million loan from SoftBank with an intriguing feature: Neumann’s collateral was WeWork stock. He can simply return them to pay off the loan, and now that they’re practically worthless, he can get $430 million in free money.
“The fact that Adam has achieved a billion-dollar valuation says it all: he will never change,” the WeWork employee said.
