Adam Neumann in 2015. Photo: Chris Floyd/Camera Press/Redux Even as WeWork’s IPO collapsed last fall and its then-CEO Adam Neumann was left walking the streets of New York barefoot, fighting for his job, the company still had a few things going for it. For one, it had become New York City’s largest occupier of commercial office space.
It’s clear now — in the midst of a global pandemic — that New York City’s real-estate market is undergoing a historic collapse. What’s less easy to see through the fog is that aspiring Adam Neumanns now have an opportunity to build new empires out of the COVID-19 wreckage, just as WeWork did from the ruins of Wall Street in 2008.
Masa was in the audience, and that night, he and Neumann met at a bar on the top floor of a building in New Delhi. The SoftBank founder harbored many of the standard doubts about WeWork’s business — it was capital-intensive, risky, and difficult to differentiate from its competitors — but he also prided himself on an ability to see through the numbers and into the soul of a business and its entrepreneur.
On the morning of Masa’s meeting with Trump, SoftBank had blocked out two hours for a tour at WeWork headquarters to see if the company might fit the Vision Fund’s brief. That morning, however, Masa was running late. Neumann grew nervous, pacing back and forth in his office as the morning dragged on and Masa was still nowhere to be found.
After Masa dropped him off, Neumann got into his white Maybach, which had been trailing Masa’s car, turned up some rap music, and drove back to WeWork headquarters. A photo of the digital napkin, with Masa’s signature in red and Neumann’s in blue, was soon circulating among WeWork executives. The entire exchange, from Masa’s 12-minute tour to signatures sealing one of the largest venture-capital investments of all time, had taken less than half an hour.
A few weeks after SoftBank’s investment was announced, Jamie Hodari met Neumann early one morning at Francis S. Gabreski Airport, which serves private jets flying in and out of the east end of Long Island. Hodari was the CEO of Industrious, a WeWork competitor with a large presence in the second-tier American cities that Neumann was only beginning to get into. While Hodari was among Neumann’s nearest rivals, he didn’t have a beach house in the Hamptons, let alone two, as Neumann did.
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