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The incredible story of the Neumanns, the 'tech-trileros' who got rich from 'coworking'

2021-08-23T03:56:33.408Z


Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto shoot a series about the charismatic founders of the WeWork empire, who lost $ 100 million a week


It was only a matter of time before the story of Adam and Rebekah Neumann ended up becoming a high-budget series, perhaps the surprising thing is how quickly it has happened.

A few days ago the first photos of the filming of

WeCrashed were seen

, with Anne Hathaway and Jared Leto dressed as guests of an Ibiza wedding, in white and beige from top to bottom and surrounded by several children and with a doll acting as a baby, dressed also in those tones.

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  • Elisabeth Holmes, the one who was the great promise of Silicon Valley, faces 20 years in prison for fraud

The series, which has no release date yet and will be seen on Apple +, is based on the podcast

WeCrashed: the Rise and Fall of WeWork

, although anyone who wants to know details of the unlikely Neumann saga can also turn to a Hulu documentary which premiered at the beginning of the year, to an episode of the HBO series

Generation Hustle

, dedicated to various scammers of the digital age, or to the book

Billion Dollar Loser

, which has as its subtitle “the epic rise and spectacular fall of Adam Neumann ”.

The Neumanns are now the supreme example of

techie

trileros

, sharing this honor perhaps only with Elizabeth Holmes, the famous entrepreneur (“the youngest self-made woman to become a billionaire!” The headlines said of her) and founder. from Theranos, a mega-company based on a well-told lie. But just two years ago, before an employee leaked to the press that their

holding company

was losing $ 100 million a week, the glamorous couple, then the owners of a spectacular portfolio of properties that included two mansions in New York, another in San Francisco, a house in the Hamptons and a gigantic Californian retreat in the shape of a guitar, represented the image of triumph in the

boom

years.

pre-pandemic. Rich, handsome, visionary, almost satanically charismatic, and capable, as Holmes was, of convincing even richer people to throw billions of dollars at them in exchange for just a promise and a smile.

That, his mephistophelic charm and guru lip, was surely the key to how Adam Neumann, an Israeli son of two doctors who served five years in the Army of his country, managed to become so spectacularly rich in such a short time. He had a very useful gift, the ability to get people to divest themselves of their dollars and turn them over to him. Instead, his wife, Rebekah, first cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow (her maiden name is Rebekah Paltrow) and friend of Ivanka Trump, was already born rich. The daughter of two entrepreneurs (the father was convicted of tax evasion), she graduated in Buddhism from the elite Cornell University, made a short film and tried to work as an actress. Later, she also tried to train in finance on Wall Street until she returned to her spiritual path and earned her yoga teacher certification.She is credited with creating the WeWork slogan, “do what you love,” and the vocabulary

new age

that permeated everything the company did, even the contracts signed by the employees, in which they promised in writing to dedicate to the company "our energy, greater than ourselves but within ourselves." The obsession with the word "We", we, always in capital letters, was also capitalized, literally. There was a point in the company's wild history when the Neumanns registered the word "We" and then resold it to their own company for $ 6 million. In her official biography on the company's website, Rebekah indicated that she had studied "with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Mother Nature."

Although she would later define herself as the founder of the company, the truth is that Rebekah was still trying to succeed as an actress (those who know her say that she was obsessed with the success of her famous cousin) when she met Adam Neumann, a guy who had left hanging the University and had failed with his first company, a clothing brand. She believed in him so much that she lent him the million dollars her parents gave her for her wedding to finance the WeWork project, which was born in 2010 as a

co-working

space rental business

.

Neumann and his partner, an architect named Miguel McKelvey, shared a curious vision perfectly suited to the past decade that combined a

turbo-capitalist

ethos

and certain pseudo-alternative ideals. They said they wanted to found a “capitalist kibbutz”. Neumann, in fact, had spent part of his childhood in a

kibbutz

in Israel, the agricultural spaces of cooperative life and work, and McKelvey had grown up in a commune in Oregon. In the beginning, they had a single location in

downtown

New York, where they

rented office modules, designed to accommodate a generation

permalances

(

Freelancers

permanent) in continuous labor fluidity.

With that very contemporary promise, in nine years and until they staged a huge bankruptcy, they had 12,500 employees in 29 countries (the company opened a space in Madrid and three in Barcelona, ​​including a house with a pool near Tibidabo and one next to al mar, in Barceloneta), they got 500,000 customers who paid standard rates (between 200 and 400 euros for the monthly rent of a work table in spaces decorated following the millennial aesthetic, with soft sofas in natural tones, sansivieras in every corner and natural fiber rugs.

More information

  • Marijuana, private jets and thousands of layoffs: this is Adam Neumann

While they were in the maelstrom of growth - a Japanese billionaire gave the Neumanns $ 4 billion to do whatever they wanted and also secured Saudi funding - the company outlined its raison d'être. They were no longer just an office rental business, they had a mission to “change the world”. That is where the other branches of the We empire arose: WeLive, dedicated to

co-living

spaces

or community housing, WeGrow, the school in which the Neumanns enrolled their four oldest children (they now have six) and with which they wanted to start an international network of technospiritual schools for children of digital nomads, who could move around the world without having to switch the kids out of school, and Rise by We, a chain of gyms driven by the same philosophy. Altogether, a "unicorn", as these types of companies are known, which came to be valued at 47,000 million dollars and had equally spectacular losses.

That all this happened while the leader of the organization was continuously high - the crew of his private plane had to put on gas masks because the

jet

was continually enveloped in a cloud of marijuana - and sipping his bottles of Tequila Don Julio 1942, which They had to always be at hand wherever I went, it makes everything even more unlikely.

Until 2018, the company held a summer camp of compulsory attendance for all employees in which there was an open bar of wine, beer and tequila and activities such as paddle surfing, zip line and parties with EDM music (which will be played in the documentaries). over the 2010s that are made in the future, which will include scenes of massive parties without a mask in which Avicii will always be in the background).

At those retreats, Neumann's speeches from the stage were legendary, halfway between Steve Jobs in his famous presentations and the character of Tom Cruise in

Magnolia,

he yelled from the stage: WORK, WORK, WORK!

In other words: work, work, work.

The employees were housed in cabins of six with communal bathrooms and the Neumanns in a series of luxury trailers located on a hill.

As the industry of books, podcasts, articles and documentaries about WeWork expands, while the legend grows as if everything had happened a million years ago in a distant place and not just yesterday before our noses, anecdotes that acquire status are emerging. mythical in the history of the Neumann and that will undoubtedly also be in the series starring Hathaway and Leto. The bottle of tequila Adam slammed against the wall in celebration; the time he called a meeting to announce layoffs and entertained it with the presence of a member of Run DMC, because who doesn't like to be fired to the rhythm of vintage hip hop; the fruit and vegetable market organized by the 47 students of the first WeGrow school and in which employees were forced to buy to avoid falling out of favor,the meeting with an investor from India that Adam Neumann missed because he had passed out in his hotel after several days of partying. There will, of course, to fill the script.

It is also easy to imagine the epilogue chapter. Ever since top investor SoftBank took over the company in October 2019 and fired Neumann with a luxury payoff of nearly $ 2 billion, the couple have been keeping a low profile, not like the days when who posed for magazines like

Porter

wearing empire. They had their sixth child in March, spent time in Tel Aviv and now live in their home in the Hamptons, which adjoins Gwyneth Paltrow's there. A few months ago Adam Neumann could be seen at an investor event in Miami, walking around disoriented. One of the attendees said it was like meeting "Jesus Christ post-crucifixion." He would surely love the simile.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-08-23

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