07 November 2023 , 15:56
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As new businesses have seemingly come from nowhere to dominate markets over the years, there's been a particular trend of their founders finding themselves launched into the stratosphere of fame and fortune.
This can lead to some wild stories of extreme luxury and lives many of us can only imagine. It can also make the people behind it seem more myth than man (or woman). Take Mark Zuckerberg for example, the Harvard dropout started Facebook from his dorm room in 2004 at the age of 14 - and now he's considered to be one of the top tech moguls on the planet.
Another founder who is known for an outlandish life is the man behind WeWork, which recently announced it had filed for bankruptcy having spectacularly fallen from grace, from being a $50billion darling of Wall Street to surprise failure. Worth $2.2 billion, according to Forbes, Adam Neumann co-founded WeWork in 2010 and ran the company as CEO until his reign came to an abrupt end in late 2019.
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The 43-year-old was born in Israel, with his parents getting divorced when he was just seven years old. He lived with his mother, moving around a fair deal and attending school near the Gaza Strip while his mum worked at a local hospital. Neumann is severely dyslexic, and reportedly couldn't read or write until he was in the third grade.
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Dreams of success
But that didn't hold him back from success, after leaving his customary stint in the Israel Defense Forces, he moved to New York City in 2001. He enrolled at Baruch College in 2002 and majored in business. It was during this time he thought of the concept 'WeLive' - WeWork's communal living business - for a school entrepreneurship competition.
However, that idea didn't get very far and was culled in the second round as a professor didn't think Mr Neumann would be able to raise enough money to "change the way people live". Similar to Zuckerberg, Neumann dropped out of college, ultimately finishing his degree 15 years later in 2017.
Adam Neumann met his wife Rebekah Paltrow Neumann while at university (FilmMagic)While in college he met his now-wife, Rebekah Paltrow Neumann, cousin of the actress Gwyneth Paltrow. The pair were married in 2009 and have five children together. While at college, Neumann worked on two business ventures - a failed idea for a collapsible heeled shoe, and baby clothes with built-in knee pads called Krawlers.
He dropped out of university to pursue Krawlers, developing it into the baby clothing company Egg Baby in 2006. To this day, Egg Baby is still around as a luxury baby clothing company, though Neumann is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations. Not long after launching Egg Baby, he met WeWork co-founder Miguel McKelvey through a mutual friend.
WeWork is born
The two are said to have bonded over their shared competitive nature and similar backgrounds, with McKelvey convincing Neumann to move the Egg Baby offices to the same building he was working out of in Brooklyn. It didn't take long for the pair to develop the idea for WeWork after coming up with ideas for renting out empty office space to other companies.
In 2008, they talked their building's landlord into letting them rent out a floor in a nearby Brooklyn building, and from that, an earth-friendly coworking company called Green Desk was born. But McKelvey and Neumann decided to go their own way, selling off their share of Green Desk to their landlord for $3 million. They opened their first WeWork space in 2020, in New York's Little Italy neighbourhood.
At his peak, Neumann was worth an estimated $4 billion, having spent more than £80 million on five homes, including two New York City properties and a home in the Hamptons. He also invested in numerous startups, both by himself and on behalf of WeWork.
Neumann, right, with Ashton Kutcher, left, as his booming business launched him into the upper echelons of society (Getty Images for WeWork)He was WeWork's largest single shareholder, but, he cashed out some of his stake and took out loans. In total, it's estimated his sales and debt transactions totalled $700 million. An Initial Public Offering (IPO) filed in August 2019 gave the most insight yet into the company and, most importantly, Neumann's leadership style.
It proved a fatal move for Neumann, who had attempted and failed to take the company public. In September 2019, WeWork's directors voted to remove Neumann as CEO after the company was forced to postpone plans to go public due to concerns from investors over Neumann's eccentric leadership style.
Throughout the years more has been uncovered about the Neumanns - their lifestyles and also their way of allegedly treating employees. In 2021, a tell-all book by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell, 'The Cult of We: WeWork, Daman Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion', shared shocking alleged stories of his managerial style.
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Jet setting lifestyle
There were stories of Neumann doing things on his own terms, with senior executives requesting in-person meetings being asked to fly with him from New York to San Francisco at the drop of a hat. But then he was just as likely to make them wait hours, leave before they arrived at the airport, or simply not have time to talk to them on the almost seven-hour flight. He's even said to have abandoned them upon landing, leaving staff to make their own way home.
Neumann stepped down as CEO in 2019 (Getty Images)He would also meet with staff and even carry out job interviews riding around in his Maybach (a superluxury car costing upwards of $200k). Then, when he was done, he'd tell them to get out and find a separate 'chase car' in his convoy. The book even said: "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."
As WeWork staff pulled long hours for free beer and stock options that would become practically worthless, the Neumanns spent almost $90 million on six properties including an over-the-top luxurious 11-acre property just north of San Francisco. It had a guitar-shaped living room, a pool, a three-storey waterslide, a spa, a racquetball court, an orchard, and "a series of narrow windows spell[ing] out the opening chords" to a Grateful Dead song.
Adam Neumann has been passionate about his Israeli heritage throughout the years, even speaking at the Israeli American Council's annual summit (Getty Images)Using private jet charters, Neumann is said to have treated the luxury aircraft like party buses. Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell, Wall Street Journal reporters, described in their book that marijuana smoke allegedly became so thick during one private jet journey that crew put on oxygen masks to breathe. VistaJet, who Nuemann used to charter flights, reportedly received jets returned in frat house conditions with alcohol spills, vomit, and torn curtain dividers, with the state so bad the aircraft had to be taken out of circulation to be cleaned or fixed.
Another more infamous story of his time in the skies came from a chartered flight on a Gulfstream jet. In 2018, he chartered the flight to take himself and his entourage to Israel, when crew reportedly discovered a cereal box allegedly containing marijuana. Shocked at the discovery of drugs, then illegal in both the US and Israel, being transported on one of their jets internationally, Gulfstream pulled the jet, leaving Neumann and his pals to find their way home.
Raunchy retreats and boozy culture
Just weeks after laying off seven per cent of WeWork staff in 2016, Neumann is said to have called an all-hands meeting to explain that the move was necessary to cut costs. Then, according to Brown and Farrell's book: ""Employees carrying trays of plastic shot glasses filled with tequila came into the room, followed by toasts and drinks".
As if that was not enough of an insult to employees who had been laid off, "Darryl McDaniels of hip-hop group Run DMC entered the room, embraced Mr Neuermann, and played a set for the staff." Tequila appeared to have been Neumann's drink of choice, with one former employee saying she had even been offered tequila during her job interview.
Then there were the company retreats. Under Neumann's reign, they became the stuff of legend due to their debauchery and music festival vibes. In 2017, the event was held just outside London, with attendees telling New York magazine they were served wine by the bottle as they watched Florence + the Machine.
Adam Neumann, co-founder of WeWork, center, during an event on the sidelines of the company's trading debut in New York (Bloomberg via Getty Images)"One employee told me she knew it was time to leave the company in 2017 when she woke in her teepee to find an unknown colleague urinating on the canvas just above her head," reported the magazine. "Talk to any community manager under 24, and it's the greatest weekend of your life... But I am not here to get peed on."
Retreats began as an annual Summer Camp spanning several days with A-list musicians like The Chainsmokers and The Weeknd. There were activities such as axe throwing, leaf printing and a drum circle. One former executive said; "It was just so much everything. Alcohol, drugs - there was not a lot of food. That was the only thing there wasn't a lot of."
During the 2014 retreat, it's been reported that Neumann had "taken psychedelic mushrooms on the first night of camp and was carrying around a water gun filled with vodka". There were also "canoes filled with cans of Coors Light and Smirnoff Ice" and "a dozen hookah pipes lined up on a table".
By 2018, the growing disparity between the Neumanns and employees was clear. Employees said they slept on air mattresses in tents while the Neumanns arrived in a private jet with a three-page ride of items they required. This included: two fridges, a Signature Range Rover, a Mercedes V Class, two dedicated bartenders, two bottles of Highland Park single-malt retailing for $1,000 each, 12 cases of Don Julio 1942, more than 200 bottles of beer and more than 45 bottles of Kosher wine.