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Adam Neumann is going to end his effort to buy WeWork. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company’s once-jettisoned founder has changed his mind about trying to regain control of it.
“For several months, we tried to work constructively with WeWork to create a strategy that would allow it to thrive,” Neumann reportedly said in a statement Tuesday. “Instead, the company looks to be emerging from bankruptcy with a plan that appears unrealistic and unlikely to succeed.”
WeWork is an office rental company he founded in 2010. It’s like a big co-working space that individuals and companies can use when they need a desk and meeting rooms and things like that. WeWork got a lot of hype — Vanity Fair reports that Neumann became such a prominent businessman that Donald Trump aide Jared Kushner once enlisted him to tout the opportunities in an “economically transformed” Palestine that would come out of Kushner’s Middle East peace proposal — and it filed to go public in 2019. A few months later, shareholders realized that the hype wasn’t translating into business success, and investor SoftBank paid Neumann hundreds of millions to leave the company and give up control.
Neumann departed just before the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically reduced office demand. WeWork filed for bankruptcy in November, and Neumann put in a bid for it.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the size of Adam Neumann’s WeWork exit package.