Where Are Adam Neumann and Rebekah Neumann Now?
Apple TV+'s WeCrashed is one of a slew of spring TV show depicting the rise and fall of a fraudulent startup founder. In it, Jared Leto plays Adam Neumann, the Israeli-born entrepreneur who founded co-working startup WeWork back in 2010. The company was a runaway success and was once valued at $47 billion, but its fortunes took a nose-dive in the run-up to a doomed public offering in 2019, and Neumann was ultimately forced out as CEO.
Anne Hathaway stars as Rebekah Neumann, Adam's wife and business partner, who spearheaded a WeWork-operated private school called WeGrow. She, too, resigned in the wake of the IPO failure. As depicted in the show, the couple's wildly over-inflated ambitions and "unusual" leadership style played a significant role in the company's downfall. Here's what the Neumanns are doing, three years on from their public flame-out.
The Neumanns are still married.
WeCrashed co-creator Drew Crevello, somewhat unexpectedly, called the series a love story during a Television Critics Association press tour panel in February. "It's this very epic rise and fall story, this meteoric ascent and equally spectacular fall," he said. "But what was fascinating to us was there was a relationship, a love story, at its heart. That's what made it so unique to us, exploring how that love contributed to that rise and fall, and really was the story of that rise and fall." And despite the fall, that love story still seems to be going strong in real life.
The Neumanns keep their relationship very private, but in an interview with Fast Company, Rebekah has called Adam her soulmate. Adam, for his part, credited Rebekah with teaching him about what he called the "soul" side of the business. And the company's collapse seemingly just brought them closer together.
The Neumanns left New York after being ousted from WeWork.
According to a New York Post report from December of 2019, the Neumanns took their $1.7 billion payout and skipped town shortly after leaving the company they built. They reportedly fled to avoid dealing with any "negative energy" resulting from WeWork's collapse. They pulled their children out of their Manhattan school—which was also owned by WeWork, more on that later—and adopted a jet-setting lifestyle that reportedly took them all over the world by private plane.
Per the Post, the family traveled to South America, and then to Israel, with a hefty entourage in tow that included "several nannies, a housekeeper and security." They reportedly enrolled their children at a Tel Aviv school for a while, before eventually returning to New York in 2020. Vanity Fair reported last summer that the family had settled in the celebrity-studded Hamptons village of Amagansett, in an estate next door to one owned by Rebekah's cousin, Gwyneth Paltrow.
The Neumanns have downsized significantly.
Their real estate portfolio has shrunk a lot since 2019. The couple have reportedly sold at least four of their six homes, including their Hamptons farmhouse, a mansion in Westchester, NY, and an estate in California. They made a reported total of $27 million from these sales. Last August, they also sold their six-bedroom townhouse in Gramercy Park, Manhattan, for just shy of $14m.
Rebekah bought back WeGrow in 2020.
The Neumann kids, naturally, attended WeGrow before they were pulled out in 2019. The private school, described by the Daily Beast as a "yoga-obsessed hippie school for the hyper-rich," was based on a curriculum designed by Rebekah. Per Forbes, that curriculum was based around "6 Pillars of Growth," which included mindfulness and entrepreneurial skills, and also featured weekly farm visits called Earth Labs. Tuition ran anywhere from $22,000 to $42,000 a year, although a spokesperson claimed that most students received scholarships.
WeGrow closed its doors shortly after Rebekah stepped down—but in the summer of 2020, Forbes reported that Rebekah had repurchased the school. At the time, her plan was apparently to relaunch it under a new name: Student of Life For Life, or SOLFIL for short. That's pronounced "soulful," by the way. Regardless, there don't seem to have been any new developments on the WeGrow/SOLFIL front since. The school's Instagram account is still live, but hasn't shared a new post since 2019.
Adam has admitted that the company's valuation "went to his head."
Both Neumanns have been largely unrepentant since the company's implosion. “They don’t think they’ve done anything wrong,” a former friend told Vanity Fair. “They think everybody loves them.” But shortly after WeWork finally went public in October of 2021, Neumann gave his first interview since leaving the company, and admitted some fault.
"The [$47 billion] valuation made us feel like we were right, which made me feel that whatever style I was leading at was a correct style at the time, so I do think it affected it," he told CNBC. "I also think the chase... maybe it went to my head. I do think at some point it did."
But he's still cooking up new "post-pandemic" business ventures.
As of April 2021, Adam was reportedly plotting a secret new venture, although no details were shared. In January 2022, he purchased $17 million of ground floor retail space in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He also purchased two high-rise apartment buildings in nearby Miami. According to Fortune, he plans to remake himself as a "residential kingpin," rather than a plain old landlord. It's possible that his goal is to relaunch WeLive, the now-defunct co-living spinoff from WeWork that would run dorm-style shared accommodation for working professionals.
“Since the spring of 2020, we have been excited about multifamily apartment living in vibrant cities where a new generation of young people increasingly are choosing to live,” DJ Mauch, a partner at Neumann’s family office, told The Wall Street Journal. “We’re excited to play a role in that future.”
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