WeWork Inc.

Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey founded WeWork in New York in 2010, offering flexible shared office space to startups and freelancers. The concept was simple: rent large office floors on long-term leases, subdivide them, and sublet on short-term flexible contracts at a premium. What distinguished WeWork from other serviced office providers was Neumann's pitch: WeWork was not a real estate company, it was a technology company — a physical social network for entrepreneurs, a community, a movement. Investors found this enormously compelling.

In 2017, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son met Adam Neumann for 28 minutes and decided to invest $4.4 billion — reportedly writing the terms on a napkin. Son later said he preferred "crazy" founders. The investment valued WeWork at $20 billion. SoftBank eventually invested over $10 billion in WeWork across multiple rounds. Neumann used the capital to expand aggressively, lease buildings in 111 cities, and live what colleagues described as an increasingly eccentric lifestyle involving tequila on private jets and a wave pool installed in a WeWork office.

WeWork filed for its IPO in August 2019 with a valuation of $47 billion. The S-1 prospectus revealed losses of $1.9 billion on revenue of $1.8 billion. It also revealed that Neumann had trademarked the word "We" and sold the trademark to WeWork for $5.9 million — money taken from investors and paid to the founder personally. It revealed that WeWork had loaned Neumann $380 million. The IPO was withdrawn within weeks. The valuation collapsed. Neumann was forced to resign.

When Adam Neumann was forced out as CEO, SoftBank paid him approximately $1.7 billion to leave — including a $185 million consulting fee for a company he had just destroyed. The payment was widely criticised as rewarding failure at a scale rarely seen in corporate history. WeWork employees who had believed in Neumann's vision and accepted below-market salaries in exchange for stock options watched their equity become worthless while their founder received $1.7 billion for departing.

WeWork filed for bankruptcy in November 2023, listing liabilities of $18.6 billion. The company that had been valued at $47 billion — more than the combined market value of all major U.S. office REITs — was worthless. The COVID-19 pandemic had devastated the flexible office market precisely when WeWork was most exposed. The company's fundamental model — borrow long, lend short, in a cyclical industry — had been fatally fragile from the beginning. Business schools now teach the WeWork story alongside Enron as a case study in corporate governance failure.