The I In We

Nine years ago, Adam Neumann discovered he could make office spaces fun and charge extra for the “community.” How did he build WeWork into a $47 billion company? Not by sharing.

- Reeves Wiedeman

IN EARLY JANUARY, employees of the We Company, formerly known as WeWork, gathered in Los Angeles for its annual summit. As with many of the company’s events, it was more tent revival than corporate off-site. The Red Hot Chili Peppers performed. Jaden Smith and Adam Rippon spoke. Diddy and Ashton Kutcher announced the winners of the annual Creator Awards. Adam Neumann, one of WeWork’s founders, took the stage as he typically does at such gatherings. Neumann is six-foot-five with long dark hair and the easy charm of a man worth several (theoretical) billions of dollars who still manages to surf regularly and used to skateboard around the office. He is known for making bombastic pronouncements, like this one at an all-company event last year: “There are 150 million orphans in the world. We want to solve this problem and give them a new family: the WeWork family.” In L.A., Neumann told his employees that the newly formed We Company would now have three prongs—WeWork, WeLive, and WeGrow—with a single, grandiose mission: “to elevate the world’s consciousness.” WeWork was born as a co-working space based partly on the idea that it should be easier for entrepreneurs like Neumann to get their ideas, good or bad, off the ground. Its core business is simple: lease offices from landlords—the company owns hardly any real estate—slice them up, and rent them out in smaller portions with an upcharge for cool design, regular happy hours, and a more flexible short-term lease. There are hundreds of coworking companies around the world, but what has long distinguished WeWork is Neumann’s insistence that his is something bigger. In 2017, Neumann declared that WeWork’s “valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue.” He has long maintained that categorizing WeWork as a real-estate concern is too limiting; it is a “community comp