This whole thing needs to be nuked from space
By 
The “whole thing” is WeWork’s amazingly toxic yet all-too-characteristic stew of new Gilded Age money madness, techbro business school bullshit disguised as messianic world transformation, vampire squid investment banking I’ll Be Gone/You’ll Be Gone self-dealing, millennial work as religion with the Rapture in the form of an end-time IPO delusions — ah just read the piece. Some tasty bits:
Neumann himself was the product. He pitched himself to investors as a gatekeeper to the rising generation. A new way of working. A new way of living. Work was 24/7, coworkers were friends, office was home, work was life. For baby boomers who experienced office life as cubicles and bad coffee, his message was irresistible. “Every investor who walked through was sold,” a WeWork executive told me. They saw Neumann as a millennial prophet who did shots of Don Julio during meetings while preaching about the dawn of a new corporate culture, one in which the beer and kombucha flowed and MacBook-toting employees would love coming to work. After sitting with Neumann in his office, outfitted with a Peloton bike, infrared sauna, and cold water plunge, Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson told Fast Company that Neumann reminded him of the Apple cofounder. Neumann later told colleagues that Isaacson might write his biography.
The fact that Neumann’s wife and co-conspirator Rebekah Paltrow Neumann is Gwyneth “Goop” Paltrow’s first cousin is the sort of detail that’s difficult to improve upon, at least from a purely novelistic perspective.
Through a combination of egomaniacal glamour and millennial mysticism, the Neumanns sold WeWork not merely as a real estate play. It wasn’t even a tech company (though he said it should be valued as such). It was a movement, complete with its own catechisms (“What is your superpower?” was one). Adam said WeWork existed to “elevate the world’s consciousness.” The company would allow people to “make a life and not just a living.” It was even capable of solving the world’s thorniest problems. Last summer, some WeWork executives were shocked to discover Neumann was working on Jared Kushner’s Mideast peace effort. According to two sources, Neumann assigned WeWork’s director of development, Roni Bahar, to hire an advertising firm to produce a slick video for Kushner that would showcase what an economically transformed West Bank and Gaza would look like. (Bahar told me he only advised on the video and no WeWork resources were used.) Kushner showed a version of the video during his speech at the White House’s peace conference in Bahrain last summer.
Oh come on.
Neumann envisioned WeWork as a “capitalist kibbutz” where members would work, eat, and drink together. McKelvey designed WeWork branches that fostered community by keeping hallways narrow and packing in open desks to encourage spontaneous encounters. After hours, members participated in yoga classes, wine tastings, and networking panels. The WeWork aesthetic evoked a cross between a Silicon Valley start-up and a boutique hotel lobby. Offices had clean lines, Danish furniture—no leather or plastic utensils allowed—and neon signs on the walls with phrases like “Hustle Harder.”
I hate all these people so very much. A capitalist kibbutz! How about a communist hedge fund? Can I trademark that concept now? (And don’t tell me concepts can’t be trademarked — that’s boomer oldthink).
The promise of IPO riches kept many employees from simply quitting. “The numbers they threw out at all-hands meetings was that this is going to be a multibillion-dollar company,” a former employee said. The money was only part of it, though. Neumann inculcated in his postcollegiate staff a belief they were members of a vanguard changing the world—or at least a belief they may work in an office but they didn’t have to grow up. Employees were expected to attend Neumann’s weekly Thank God It’s Monday parties and a roving annual retreat called Summer Camp held in different years at an upstate New York compound and an English country estate. The events were one part TED Talk (quantum physicist Michael Brooks gave a lecture) and another part Animal House (employees played beer pong and partied to performances by Florence and the Machine and Two Door Cinema Club).
I’ve never even heard of Two Door Cinema Club, which is probably why I can’t seem to talk a Japanese investor into giving me four billion dollars in exchange for the consciousness-transforming insight that you can make money by leasing office space in Manhattan.
Neumann’s charisma was intoxicating to be around. “If you had to go to war, you wanted him to be your general,” a former executive said. “His sense of himself is beyond human,” recalled another. Neumann paraded through the office barefoot with celebrities like Drake and Ashton Kutcher and had an unnerving ability to maintain eye contact during conversation, lending him the aura of a guru. “When you’re in a room with Adam, he can almost convince you of anything,” a former employee said. Neumann used mass gatherings to spread his gospel. “I think the thing that all of us know is that if you want to succeed in this world you have to build something that has intention,” he said on stage at Summer Camp in 2013, his hair pulled into a ponytail. “Every one of us is here because it has meaning, because we want to do something that actually makes the world a better place. And we want to make money doing it!” The crowd of thousands exploded in cheers. “So many of the people were young and had never worked in a real company. They bought all of it,” a former senior executive said. “I realized after I got there it was a cult.”
There’s a lot of that going around. Speaking of which:
In conversations with people inside and outside the company, Neumann’s pronouncements became wilder. He told one investor that he’d convinced Rahm Emanuel to run for president in 2020 on the “WeWork Agenda.” (Emanuel did not respond to a request for comment.) Neumann told colleagues that he was saving the women of Saudi Arabia by working with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to offer women coding classes, according to a source. In another meeting, Neumann said three people were going to save the world: bin Salman, Jared Kushner, and Neumann. Shortly after the news broke in October 2018 that Saudi agents tortured dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and carved his body with a bone saw, likely on order from the crown prince himself, Neumann told George W. Bush’s former national security adviser Stephen Hadley that everything could be worked out if bin Salman had the right mentor. Confused, Hadley asked who that person might be, according to a source familiar with the meeting. Neumann paused for a moment and said: “Me.”
The election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States will remain an eternal mystery.