Adam Neumann Wants WeWork Back. Does WeWork Want Adam Neumann?

Adam Neumann’s $47 billion company WeWork was only sort of imaginary. Investors really had put money into WeWork at a rate that valued the company, when it was private, at $47 billion. But in the course of Neumann’s management, WeWork hit the skids, Neumann found himself pushed out, and the company’s value had slumped to a paltry $9 billion by the time it went public. Along his way, Neumann personally extracted well over a billion bucks in stock awards, noncompete agreements, and settlements. And now WeWork is bankrupt, ostensibly worth no dollars, and the New York Times reported on Tuesday that Neumann is attempting to close a very funny deal: After building multigenerational wealth on WeWork, he might like to buy it, for not quite zero, but close enough.

The twist is, WeWork is resisting! The New York Times reported on Monday that Neumann has been sniffing around to buy his old company out of bankruptcy. He has the backing of hedge funder Dan Loeb, and Neumann’s lawyers wrote in a letter to WeWork’s board that they have been working on preparing a bid since December (one month after the company filed for bankruptcy) but found WeWork to be stonewalling them. Neumann’s team says that though they’ve been trying to get the information necessary to make a bid, WeWork hasn’t provided it, and claims that the Neumann plan could not just pay off WeWork’s debts but “could significantly exceed” them, (theoretically leaving something for WeWork shareholders whose shares of stock have gone to zero). “WeWork should at least educate itself about that potential and not preclude itself from maximizing value,” a Neumann lawyer says. One reason it ought to? As of the end of June, WeWork said it had $13 billion in long-term lease obligations, a figure it has been trying to whittle down. It also listed $2.9 billion in long-term debt. The Times, citing industry experts, suggests that Neumann could get the company for “a fraction” of its debts, maybe about $500 million. They’re practically giving it away.

One can imagine a natural reason why WeWork’s bankruptcy management team may not want to consider overtures by Adam Neumann, co-founder and former CEO of WeWork: He is the guy who oversaw the decline of this company in the first place and made more than a billion bucks doing it. Sure, there were more causes of failure than just one CEO’s eccentricities and poor management. (The pandemic, you may have heard, was not so good for corporate real estate, though that came after Neumann was gone.) But handing WeWork back to Neumann might still feel wrong. This is a man whose actions led to Jared Leto playing him in an Apple TV+ miniseries about the company called WeCrashed. This is a man who took $5.9 million from his company (with board approval, somehow) in exchange for the trademark of the word “We.” (He later returned it.) This is a man who has been the subject of a federal complaint for pregnancy discrimination stemming from his actions toward his own former chief of staff. Neumann did not just oversee a company whose valuation chart looks like the Grand Canyon. He did it while acting in ways that looked self-interested and cruel. It might feel gross to let him try again.

On the other hand, we live in a world of silly second acts, and nothing here is a moral enterprise. Neumann got $350 million last year from venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz for a new residential real estate firm he has named “Flow.” That investment values the startup at more than $1 billion, the Times said. Some very rich people still seem to believe in Neumann, and his money is green too. If Neumann and his partners are actually ready and willing to settle WeWork’s debts (let alone maybe give something to shareholders), WeWork’s board should probably hear them out. After all, the guy who lost the most money on WeWork—the CEO of SoftBank—still loves and respects Neumann. So it would be a fitting end if the company that Neumann built and then helped crash winds up leaving bankruptcy by taking money that Neumann got from his leadership of said bankrupt company. Sometimes you have to tip your cap to a person who can wreak a bit of financial chaos and still wind up friends, or at least partners, with others on the scene.

The irony of WeWork’s bankruptcy is that it failed like a regular old company, not a venture capital darling whose eccentric boss became famous. Neumann stepped down under pressure in 2019, but WeWork didn’t slide into bankruptcy until 2023. In the intervening time, WeWork went public not as anything near the $47 billion company it once was on paper, but still as a valuable business. When it started trading on public markets in 2021, after the pandemic’s shattering of corporate real estate had already occurred, WeWork’s stock went up. WeWork’s post-Neumann leaders puffed their chests out to take credit. “Sure, this is a story where a lot of people wrote documentaries that it was the end of WeWork. Well, the resistance, the persistence of these people is incredible. This company is here, is stronger than ever, and no doubt that we’re going to be celebrating many more milestones,” the executive chairman said.

About that. WeWork ended up spending a ton of money on leases and was not getting enough customers to pay its landlords. The company tried lots of kitschy tricks while things got very bad over the past few years: a reverse stock split to make its shares 40 times bigger so that they’d stay on the New York Stock Exchange. (It worked but, like, not really.) The outright skipping of interest payments worth $95 million. And eventually, filing for bankruptcy while declaring last fall that it would try to renegotiate its done-deal leases. None of that is entirely separable from Neumann’s leadership of WeWork—probably if he’d done a better job, or been a more efficient spender of money, or taken a less profligate golden parachute on his way out, then WeWork could’ve had more money, or a sounder reputation. Either way, its position would have been better. Still, the fact remains that Neumann did not outright kill WeWork; people and companies who didn’t want to use WeWork did. The company was saying itself when it went public that there was still plenty of open road ahead of WeWork. Investors substantiated that vision by buying the stock.

So if Neumann would like to give some of his WeWork money back to WeWork in exchange for making the company his problem, that might be just fine. Does the board have deeper reasons for not wanting to deal with him, beyond how bad it would look to let him have control again? It very well might. It’s possible that WeWork’s current management sees Neumann as a goofball and does not think he will actually put together a workable deal. Even much more highly regarded businesspeople sometimes run into this skepticism when they try to make acquisitions. Just last year, a very fancy hedge fund manager tried to buy another hedge fund, and the board spent weeks brushing him off because they didn’t think his deal would actually close. (Ultimately they used him as leverage to get another offer increased.) Perhaps WeWork’s board just does not think Neumann is worth its time.

Or maybe the people currently in charge of WeWork are just dogged true believers that they themselves can steer the company out of bankruptcy. WeWork has been talking like that for months. When it filed for bankruptcy, its CEO said, “these steps will enable us to remain the global leader in flexible work.” I don’t know how many people took that as anything other than going through the motions for the sake of not discouraging offers of help, but anything is possible; maybe he does believe it. Maybe all of those lease renegotiations are going better than any of us know, and WeWork is just a few good breaks away from a comeback. It’s only been a few years since COVID, and reasonable people still disagree about what the future of work looks like. Stranger things have happened than someone finding a way to turn WeWork into a viable business without tapping the wallet of a founder in exile.

That is what the company sounds like it’s trying to get across, even now. Responding to the report about Neumann without naming him, WeWork says, in part, “We continue to believe that the work we are currently doing—addressing our unsustainable rent expenses and restructuring our business—will ensure WeWork is best positioned as an independent, valuable, financially strong and sustainable company long into the future.” Sure, why not? It’s not much weirder than thinking Neumann would fix things. At least if Neumann were doing it, WeWork would have already gotten some money out of him. Neumann is reportedly weird, and WeWork is weird, but a departed founder giving a beleaguered company a bunch of cash so he can try again and earn both money and some updates to his Wikipedia page? That might just be the standard order of business.