The shocking ways WeWork’s ex-CEO Adam Neumann treated staff
Adam Neumann came up at the right time: on the tail of the
great recession when everybody wanted to be an entrepreneur and office space
was available on the cheap.
After immigrating from Israel to New York City in 2001, he
tried his hand at Krawlers — a line of baby clothing with padded knees — which
flopped. When he co-founded the shared-workspace company WeWork three years
later, it was with some of a $1 million wedding present he and wife, Rebekah,
had received from her Long Island parents.
But Adam, now 42, was never exactly a nose-to the grindstone
guy. As co-authors Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell reveal in the book “The Cult
of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion” (Crown), out
Tuesday, expensive shortcuts appealed to Adam.
For example, he became obsessed with surfing, but found it a
hassle to get to the big waves. “The way I surf, I don’t have time for
paddling,” he told a colleague. Instead, he would hop on a chauffeured Jet Ski.
As the book puts it, “Most surfers consider [this] cheating—like a mountain
climber hopping a ride on a helicopter most of the way up.”
Some surf spots in Hawaii even forbid the practice, but Adam
would hire local surf coaches who knew how to skirt regulations.
In the book, the Neumanns are portrayed as a pair of Marie
Antoinette-like figures: living it up — partying on private jets, spending money
like water and leaving employees to clean up their messes — while their world
was beginning to crumble around them.
WeWork was founded in 2010 and thrived as a hot commodity
before turning into a hopeless money suck for investors. Between missed opportunities
and the erratic behavior of Adam, its CEO, WeWork became a shambles by 2019.
WeWork senior executives requesting an in-person meeting
might be asked to fly with Adam from New York to San Francisco at a moment’s
notice. But then he was just as likely to make them wait for hours, leave
before they arrived at the airport or simply not have time to talk to them on
the six-and-a-half-hour flight.
Sometimes he abandoned them upon landing, leaving staffers
to find their own way home. This mirrored his behavior on land, too. Adam would
meet with staff and even interview prospective employees while riding around in
his Maybach, a superluxury car costing more than $200,000 — then, when he was done,
tell them to get out and ride in a separate “chase car” in his convoy.
According to the book, “One executive was shown the door in
the middle of gridlocked traffic on the Long Island Expressway — instructed to
find the chase car somewhere behind them in the traffic.”
In 2018, he got a taste of his own medicine.
For a personal trip to Israel, Adam borrowed a G650ER plane
from Gulfstream as he was awaiting delivery of the WeWork private jet. After
landing, the crew discovered a cereal box full of marijuana in a closet,
presumably left for the return home.
As the authors write, “Smoking on board was one thing, but
transporting marijuana — an illegal drug in New York and Israel — across
borders … might expose Gulfstream to serious risks.”
Gulfstream pulled the jet, leaving Adam and his pals to find
their own way home.
Adam and his cohort were notorious among private jet crews.
After a chartered trip to Mexico City in 2015, the operator, Gama Aviation,
complained to WeWork that “passengers were spitting tequila on each other”; one
passenger became sick “throughout the cabin and lavatory,” requiring extra
cleaning; and that the “crew was not tipped.”
VistaJet, the authors write, was frequently forced to deal
with Adam’s onboard partying: taking jets out of service to clean up alcohol
spills and vomit. On multiple occasions, the CEO or one of his companions tore
down a curtain divider.
The Neumanns would throw weekend dinner parties at their
WeGrow school, then leave a mess for educators to clean up on Monday.
WeWork
On one of Adam’s flights, there was so much marijuana smoke
in the cabin that the crew felt the need to don oxygen masks.
Back on land, Adam’s wife, Rebekah, who is now 43, was
telling interviewers that the couple “believe in this new ‘Asset Light’
lifestyle.”
It was a pretty rich statement.
Upon buying a $15 million Tudor-style home in Pound Ridge,
NY, the Neumanns added 2,000 square feet to the existing 13,000 and reduced the
nine bedrooms to five supersized ones. At the WeWork headquarters on Eighteenth
Street near Sixth Avenue, Adam installed a secret exit, an “ice plunge” — a
metal tub filled with ice water, meant to stand in to refresh one’s legs — and
a “smoke eater.” A high-powered HVAC vent usually used in cigar bars to keep
the air clear, Neumann’s smoke eater was for marijuana, according to the book.
It seemed like a fancy contraption for a man who, during
meetings, would sometimes finish off meals prepared by his private chef by
licking the plate clean.
When the Neumanns paid $34 million for a compound of
apartments on Irving Place, a makeover was inevitable. They combined the fifth,
sixth and seventh floors, demolishing interior walls on one floor to create a
gargantuan master bedroom. (Buying so many units gave the couple control of the
building’s condo board, meaning no stops to the renovation.)
But that was nothing next to their most desired
customization.
Rebekah was scared of a 5G cellular antenna next to their
apartment — afraid that electromagnetism from it could cause cancer. Her brother
had died of cancer at 23, as had other close relatives, including her uncle
Bruce Paltrow (the father of Gwyneth Paltrow). Despite there being little
scientific research to back up concerns about 5G technology, Rebekah was
adamant: The antenna had to go.
First, WeWork’s CFO Artie Minson, who had previously worked
at Time Warner Cable, was asked to persuade Verizon or Sprint to find a new
home for the antenna — despite him busily preparing WeWork for an IPO. Minson
didn’t get far, so others in the organization were roped in.
Finally, it landed with Maria Comella, WeWork’s top public
affairs and policy executive. She had been chief of staff to Gov. Cuomo and an
aide to Chris Christie. But in the spring of 2018, she was tasked with calling
up phone companies and pleading for her boss and his wife: Please move this
antenna.
“We understand that the Neumanns got to a point where they
found a way to buy out the cell carrier’s lease and would have been able to
have it taken down,” co-author Eliot Brown told The Post. “But that happened
right as things were imploding [at WeWork]. To the best of our knowledge, it
did not come down.”
Meanwhile, Rebekah wasn’t happy with the education of their
five kids. So in 2017, she and Adam created their own elementary school: WeGrow
was housed at the WeWork offices in Chelsea. The curriculum included regular
jaunts to the Neumanns’ Pound Ridge home, where the students picked produce and
learned about farming. Tuition went up to $42,000.
But once again, the Neumanns treated their employees like
serfs. Teachers would return on Monday to find trash on the floor and chairs in
the wrong rooms — all because Adam and Rebekah had used the school for a dinner
party. Educators would have to hurriedly clean up, and then, according to the
book, “spend the first few days of the week reprimanding the Neumanns’ children
and … their friends to observe rules regarding climbing on [structures] or
swinging from them. The children would protest: ‘We were allowed to do that
this weekend. Why can’t we now?’”
Rebekah would apologize, only for it to happen again. (The
school closed in 2019 after the WeWork IPO floundered, but Rebekah bought the
rights to the curriculum and hopes to relaunch WeGrow.)
There was one person who called BS on Adam’s hubris: Elon
Musk.
Adam was hungry to work with the SpaceX and Tesla head on
his plans for Mars, where Musk aspires to one day construct a habitable colony.
After finally securing a meeting, Adam was kept waiting for hours before Musk
gave him minutes to pitch his own idea for a community on the planet.
“Getting to Mars would be the easy part, Adam told [Musk].
Building community would be hard,” the authors write. “Musk, Adam later
recalled to his staff, was unimpressed and lectured Adam about how getting
there was, in fact, the hard part. Musk was an idol, yet he put Adam in his
place … When Adam recounted the meeting to Rebekah, she told him it was a
moment of humility he probably needed.”
He had faced a similar moment the year before, but it didn’t
seem to faze Adam.
While in India to meet with investors about expanding WeWork
to that country, Adam partied a little too hard the night before. The planned
meeting time came and went as staffers waited in the hotel lobby for their
fearless leader.
Finally, security was asked to enter the CEO’s room and
check on him. Adam was passed out cold. The meeting missed, he instead spent
the day recovering at a spa.
Things came to a head on Sept. 22, 2019, nine months after
WeWork received its enviable $47 billion valuation. According to a story in the
Wall Street Journal, which the book’s authors helped write, company directors
planned to press Adam to step down.
Reasons cited included his drug use, eccentric behavior and
delayed initial public offering of a company that burned through $2 billion in
2018 and thrived with the help of some $12 billion in venture capital money and
debt.
One month later, Adam was out. His personal worth plunged
from $10 billion to, Forbes reported, $750 million. (His fortune is now valued
at more than $1 billion.)
According to the authors, he received more than $192 million
in cash for walking away, as well as a revised stock award of around $245
million and permission to sell more than $500 million in WeWork stock.
He and Rebekah sold two of their eight homes and were seen
in December 2019 at San Francisco International Airport — flying commercial.
But one thing hasn’t changed.
As Adam spends his days surfing in Montauk, the authors
write, “His squad was mostly gone, but he wasn’t completely alone. He was still
paying someone to tug him out to the waves on the back of a Jet Ski.”
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