Headquartered in New York but Silicon Valley-reminiscent due to Neumann’s grand vision of providing tricked-out shared workspace accommodations—a “physical social network,” he called it—for tech employees and startups all over the world, WeWork was valued at $47 billion and on the verge of going public in 2019. But its estimated worth plummeted when reports surfaced of the CEO’s questionable financials and alleged mistreatment of staff, and instead the company ended up on the verge of bankruptcy.
Neumann resigned as chief executive but sold his WeWork shares to investor SoftBank, as well as received a reported $185 million consulting fee—all of which was also chronicled in the 2021 documentary WeWork: Or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, which is streaming on Hulu.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think, and there have been multiple lessons, multiple regrets,” he told Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times DealBook conference last November. But at first, he noted, the concept was “working out phenomenally.” (Incidentally, their talk is Emmy-nominated for Outstanding Live Interview at the 43rd Annual News & Documentary Awards, to be presented Sept. 28-29.)
So in this case we have a series about another rock star type with a big idea, making big promises, living large and misfiring spectacularly but then walking away still obscenely rich, even after the lawyers have been paid. (See: Gordon-Levitt’s criticism of the system.) And in August, Neumann surfaced with news of his latest venture, a real estate start-up called Flow that has no lesser aim than to transform the rental housing market, and which has attracted a reported $350 million in funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
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