In the Beginning There Was Adam... | 1

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It was June 2017, and the Barclays Center in Brooklyn was packed. Nearly every seat of the arena was filled with thousands of Baruch College graduates and their families. I'm looking at all the parents. I'm looking at balloons. I'm seeing horns, just people smiling. I think I had a smile on my face probably the whole time.

Kwame Francis was graduating second in his class, which meant he had one of the best seats in the house. I was on stage and it was just like, wow, I'll be seated next to, you know, some distinguished people. The year before, Senator Chuck Schumer had been the commencement speaker. This year, though, was different. Because this year, the person giving the speech was also graduating, just like Kwame.

Welcome Baruch College class of 2017. As soon as he walks on stage, he's tall guy, long hair, slick back. Adam Neumann. All six feet five inches of him had taken 15 years from his first class to finally get his college degree. And here he was. He looked out at a sea of black mortar boards and clasped his hands together in what looked like a gesture of prayer.

It's my honor and privilege to graduate with all of you today. With his billowing robe, flowing black hair and arms outstretched, Adam looked more like a preacher than what he actually was. the CEO of a multi-billion dollar startup called WeWork. And Adam was here to spread the spirit of we. It was definitely not a traditional commencement speech. The next revolution.

is going to be the WE revolution. And the WE revolution is going to be led by the WE generation. And the WE generation does not discriminate between age, race, gender or religion. They're throwing their hands up, they're fist pumping, you know, people are standing up and cheering him on. You could think of somebody being the life of the party, you could think of him. So as Kwame and the other students listen, Adam told them his story.

how he had first moved to New York from Israel to get a degree at Baruch College. I spent my first two years in Baruch studying a little bit and partying a lot. But then, a close friend of his came from Israel to visit. He looked at me and said, is this why you left Israel? Is this why you left your family and your loved ones, everyone you care about, to go party in New York City? I was inspired by his words and by his harsh criticism. I woke up the next morning and said, it's time.

to start my first business adventure. Eventually, Adam left Baruch behind as his business career took off. But he was here today, he said, because even after he'd become a billionaire, all his grandma ever wanted was for him to finish college. Safda Esti, who paid for my full tuition, she really did want me to graduate. She really did. And she kept asking me every year, when are you graduating? When are you graduating?

And I said, Esty, you know, we've done, I have a family, we're doing well. No, when are you graduating? I need to hang it above my bed. It was a good story, and Adam was a great storyteller. He commanded a presence unlike any other. He definitely took everybody's attention. So it was just very different. A different kind of message. We are we. And if we work together, we cannot be stopped.

WeWork, the business Adam founded, was more than just a company to him. Yes, he wanted to become the world's first trillionaire, but he also truly believed that his company would fundamentally change not just how people work. and how they live, how they raise children, how they communicate with one another. Adam believed he was on the brink of making history. And in a way, you know, he was. Because Adam Newman was about to...

presided with the largest, fastest wipeout of shareholder value by a single company since Enron. Looking back, maybe the most telling moment of the whole commencement speech was when he shared a story about his first date with his wife. Rebecca went on the first date with me, and within five minutes, now I say five minutes to be nice, but it truly took 10 seconds, she looked me straight in the eye, and she said, you, my friend, are full of shit.

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From Wondery, I'm David Brown, the host of Business Wars. And this is We Crashed, The Director's Cut. This series originally came out in early 2020, just months after the swift and spectacular collapse of WeWork. Now, it has inspired a TV series starring Jared Leto as the charismatic founder Adam Neumann. and Anne Hathaway as his wife, Rebecca. In conjunction with the new TV series, we've revisited WeWork's origins and epic Fall from Grace to give WeCrash a complete refresh.

with new details, new interviews, and new discoveries about the rise and fall, and now some would say the rise again, of WeWork. For nearly a decade, WeWork was known for renting cool, flexible office space to millennials, offering perks like free beer, fruity water, and kombucha on tap. It was the glossy poster child of startup America.

And a new kind of workforce. And to Silicon Valley and Wall Street, WeWork was the target of a frantic search to invest in the next billion-dollar startup. At its peak... WeWork was valued at $47 billion. Today, that's worth more than Chipotle, Kellogg's, or Spotify. Adam Neumann convinced many of his employees. tech investors, and the press that this was the start of a WE revolution. But was it really all about WE? Or was it all about the glory of Adam Neumann?

and the outsized, out-of-control egos of him and his wife, Rebecca. As a journalist, the host of Business Wars, and former anchor of Public Radio's Marketplace, I've covered plenty of breathlessly hyped companies. But... WeWork is a particularly crazy story of excess, hubris, and unrealistic expectations. In fact, an implosion more dramatic than just about anything I've seen in the business world.

We're pleased to bring you this six-part series on the rise and fall of WeWork. And this is Episode 1. In the beginning, there was Adam.

It was 2010, and Lisa Skye was having a whirlwind week. She'd first met with her new boss on a Wednesday, and by Friday, she had a job offer. When Lisa woke up Monday morning for her first day, she had an email waiting from her new boss. February 1st, and it looks like it was 1.20 a.m., and he wrote, good morning.

Let's build the largest networking community on the planet. The email was from Adam Newman. And I remember thinking, all right, I'm about to be on a ride. At the time, WeWork was just four people. I think my title was founding community manager. But I actually don't know what I put on a LinkedIn at this point. I think it was like head of community. I mean, the reality is that I had many, many hats.

On Lisa's first day on the job, WeWork had zero tenants. They just managed to secure their first location, and they were scrambling to get it ready. And so I was sales, tours, billing, booking, IT, janitor. I mean, you know, whatever they needed, that's what got done. It was just a natural fit to be helping to open shared office-based communities and buildings. I love creating community, connecting people. So Adam pushed Lisa to get as many members as she could.

I remember showing up, you know, my first week of work and, you know, Adam basically said, okay, we're going to open the first 17 offices in the building in three weeks and I want to be full with a wait list. And so from the very beginning, he's always been... Like, go, go, go, you know, sort of, you know, like arms surged forward. Like, let's do this. WeWork's first location was at the corner of Grand and Lafayette in Manhattan, Soho.

It had a red brick facade with six rickety floors of high ceilings, large windows, and bucket loads of what real estate agents in New York City like to call charm. that first building 154 grand is not a class a or b building or maybe even c or d i mean it's like a class d building where the elevator literally is so old that it would take 52 seconds

to go from the first floor up to the sixth floor. And for an elevator in New York City, that's a lifetime. Lisa shadowed Adam on a few tours and watched closely how he pitched the co-working space to prospective tenants. When you toured with Adam, you were being taken on a ride.

I think with his vision, you know, he would look out the window and say that empty parking lot is going to be transformed into a beautiful garden. And you're going to have all of these other different types of professionals who are here that you're going to be able to. connect with and create community with and you're going to eat lunch and spend all this time and do business together and downstairs we're going to have a gym. And, you know, it was always a big vision.

The small crew hustled to get the space ready by opening day. The three weeks leading up to then was me giving tours every day, stepping over people who were in construction, dust everywhere. The other co-founder, Miguel McKelvey, was in charge of the design. He wanted the offices to have exposed brick walls, so they needed to soda blast the old paint off. Miguel would tell NPR about it years later.

We would rent zip cars, drive out to this place in New Jersey, load up the car with like these packs of baking soda and we'd put so much in there that it would be like riding on the wheels on the tires so we'd be like driving back from New Jersey through the tunnel and you'd hear this like

Even Lisa, whose job was to sign up customers, was doing manual labor. Screwing legs in on... desks and putting you know lamps on all the tables and plugging in extension cords under tables and rolling in filing cabinets and I was printing welcome notes to put on people's desks and it was just nuts. Well, the end result was something. Yeah, the elevator may have been creaky. Sure, maybe the floor squeaked. But in the end, the building looked pretty amazing.

They opened one floor at a time, filling each one with tenants. But they had more wannabe WeWorkers than they had space for. We were literally pushing, you know, to the night before, you know, with the opening of every floor, we would just be push, push, push, get the floor open. And so there's dust everywhere. It was always, again, sort of...

rush to get the floor done. It was as fast as you can. That fall in 2010, Lisa channeled her old job as an on-air reporter to host an online video for her new company. Welcome to WeWork After Dark. This is the monthly happy hour that we have down here in Soho. Tonight is a very exciting night because we are celebrating 170 offices, 185 companies, and 350 members that we brought into a building in just...

over six and a half months. As the DJ spun the Black Eyed Peas, WeWork tenants, sorry, members, talked about how their experience was different from other workplaces. What did you love about it? First of all, I just love the open airiness. Because I'm all about, I love openness and airiness. Adam was there too, standing a good foot taller than Lisa, dressed in a black v-neck t-shirt and collarless black leather jacket.

He was 31, but he looked even younger. I think we're changing the way people do business, and I think that's what it's all about. We want to make a game changer, and I think this business is on its way to be one. See, America was still in the hangover of the Great Recession. It was the start of what would become known as the gig economy, and WeWork was tapping into what seemed like the perfect formula for a new workforce. It is becoming a community that's sharing...

Talent and sharing work and sharing vision and as the future is going to move forward We're going to do more and more than that. We're going to share our work. We're going to share our nonprofit work And we're going to share socially. And we're going to make each other responsible for other people. So if someone next to us is going to be doing bad, it's going to be our job to pick them up. WeWork was only a six-month-old company. It only had a single location.

Yet Adam's vision of the future already sounded remarkably clear. He was thinking big about what WeWork could accomplish. And why not? WeWork already needed a second location to keep up with demand. Adam and Miguel looked around Manhattan and set their sights on some empty office space right across the street from the Empire State Building. But there was just one problem. The building didn't want some upstart subleasing company as their tenant.

But Adam had a plan. He invited David Czar, son of the wealthy family that owned the building, for a tour of WeWork's Soho offices. Adam wanted to show David Czar that what he'd built was special. And... He wanted to offer him a drink. As night fell outside the Florida ceiling windows, Adam, the Israeli, and David, the Iranian, talked for hours. They drank.

Adam pitched his vision for the second location, and they drank some more. What Adam wanted that night was a signed lease. He kept hammering David. It was the kind of thing that would happen for Adam again and again. When he really wanted something, he wouldn't stop until he got it. It took a half a bottle of Johnny Walker Black, but finally, sometime late into the night, Adam closed the deal.

Adam reportedly expected that David would have some misgivings. So the next day, when David came back to him, Adam had a response ready. I understood that Persians were men of their word. David Czar agreed to honor the deal, whether he liked it or not. WeWork's model of renting and subleasing office space desk by desk was shaking up the New York real estate landscape. Lisa remembers that Adam was looking to expand even more.

I can see that from the very beginning, he was in and out with prospective investors, I'm sure prospective landlord partners. A few co-working spaces in Manhattan was nice, sure. But Adam... was ready to go even bigger. And for that, he needed to convince investors to give him a lot more money.

I'm Raza Jafri, and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Morten Storm, the spy who lived inside Al-Qaeda. Unfulfilled with his life in a notorious Danish biker gang, Morten Storm is lost. One afternoon, he stumbles into a library looking for answers. He finds them in the form of a book about Islam. The towering, ginger-haired Dane doesn't know it yet, but that moment will hurl him into a world of radicalism.

and see him rise through the ranks of militant Islamist organization, Al-Qaeda, only to suffer a huge crisis of faith. He turns from devotee to spy, tasked with rooting out some of Al-Qaeda's most feared generals. The CIA and MI5 bid for his allegiance as he loses himself in a life of cash-laden suitcases, double crosses and betrayal. Follow The Spy Who on the Wondery app or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Or you can binge the full season of The Spy Who Lived Inside Al-Qaeda early and ad-free with Wondery Plus. How hard is it to kill a planet? Maybe all it takes is a little drilling, some mining. and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere. When you see what's left, it starts to look like a crime scene. Are we really safe? Is our water safe? You destroyed our town. And crimes like that, they don't just happen. We call things accidents.

There is no accident. This was 100% preventable. They're the result of choices by people. Ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime. These are the stories we need to be telling about our changing planet. Stories of scams, murders, and cover-ups that are about us and the things we're doing to either protect the Earth or destroy it.

Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

In the spring of 2012, Adam Newman was giving maybe his most important tour yet of WeWork. Bruce Dunleavy. A thin, balding guy in his mid-50s was a partner at one of the big Silicon Valley investment firms, and Bruce's company had backed tech giants like eBay, Twitter, and Uber. When a friend first told him and his colleagues about WeWork, they didn't think much of it. But after a few positive phone calls with Adam, Bruce decided he had to meet him in person. Bruce admired the chutzpah.

Most startup entrepreneurs looking for funding would have jumped on the next plane. But Adam firmly believed people had to experience WeWork for themselves to understand it. Now, here Bruce was in New York. to see for himself what Adam and his co-founders had built. Bruce spent the whole day with Adam. What he saw was a company catering to the habits of a new workforce, one that wanted flexibility and community. WeWork wasn't shared office space. It was a real-life social network.

The economics of the business looked good and he was impressed with Adam. I liked him immediately. Adam's just a charming, charismatic person who is very persuasive to a lot of people. Bruce was in. But as they started to negotiate the size of the investment, Bruce believed Adam was valuing WeWork too high. You only have three buildings, Bruce told him. Adam, as usual, didn't miss a beat. What do you mean?

I have hundreds of buildings. They're just not built yet. Adam closed the deal and Bruce took a seat on the board. From the early days of WeWork, Adam was obsessed with his company's valuation. the term for how much investors or the stock market determine a company is worth. Now, with Bruce's company's investment, WeWork's valuation jumped to nearly $100 million.

Not too shabby for a business that had been around only a couple of years and had just a handful of locations. Within a year, Adam took on more investors. WeWork's valuation quadrupled to north of $400 million. Now that they had some serious cash to play with, Adam knew just what to do. Hardy. On an August day in summer 2013, Adam walked onto the outdoor stage and took the mic. A full band stood behind him, a drunken crowd of WeWork employees in front. This was summer camp.

WeWork's weekend-long party in upstate New York. White marquee tents flanked the red-lit stage. Adam's hair was in a ponytail, a red Kabbalah string bracelet around his wrist. I am so happy. to have all of you here tonight. Who was here last year? Raise your hand if you were here last year. The crowd went nuts jumping up and down, while behind Adam, the band sipped from their water bottles looking unimpressed.

One musician politely clapped his hand against his trumpet. Summer camp would become a WeWork tradition. It was a chance for employees to act like big kids. You know, kayaking, face painting, pie-eating contests. And drinking. Lots and lots of drinking. As usual, Adam's speech went heavy on the spiritual stuff. Thank you. Thank you for being part of something.

that actually has a meaning and what puts us together all of us here is every one of us is here because it has a meaning because we want to do something that actually makes the world a better place and we want to make money doing it adam threw his hands up in a shrug and the crowd went wild. Summer camp was over, but the party kept going. In February 2014,

Adam closed WeWork's biggest deal yet. High-profile investors, including billionaire real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman and JP Morgan, poured another $150 million into the company. WeWork.

was now officially a unicorn. The magic term given to privately owned startup companies valued at more than a billion dollars. There was a group of the wealthiest families in the world. It was March 2014. And Scott Galloway was sitting in front of an audience in Miami. I was in a suit out of respect for the organization, and he was in jeans and a blazer and a T-shirt. Scott is a respected business school professor at NYU.

And he was here to interview Adam. This was J.P. Morgan's Alternative Investment Summit. In the crowd, hundreds of the bank's biggest clients. Simply put, he's dreaming. Scott had never met the WeWork CEO before. You know, he's a very handsome guy. He's got a great accent. He's very charismatic. I mean, you want to believe this story. It was sort of this cross between, at least aesthetically, between Jesus Christ and Nacho, the famous polo player.

Right away, Scott could tell this guy was a character. One of the things I remember is halfway through our interview, he took off one of his shoes and was just kind of like letting it all hang out. In front of this crowd of very serious investors. Scott wasn't there just to ask softball questions. So he asked Adam about potential competition.

Wasn't Adam worried that big real estate moguls with lots of property could simply start their own co-working spaces and beat WeWork at its own game? He began talking about culture, and this is a movement. And quite frankly, it just all sounded like bullshit. And a lot of it was yoga babble. Yoga babble, by the way, is a term Scott coined. He's even created a yoga babble index, which rates the bullshit level of corporate slogans and buzzwords.

And it was a good Yoga Babble. It was Yoga Babble dressed in a really good-looking bow and great wrapping, but it was a lot of talk about movement and culture and spiritual awakening and empowerment. You know, raising, if you will, our collective consciousness, that was a line that he used. Scott wasn't convinced. Still, he was impressed. I said, dude, I have no idea about this concept.

But in my next life, I'm coming back as you. And the whole audience erupted in a laughter because they looked at this guy and you thought, who doesn't want to be a 30-something-year-old male living in Manhattan, deploying billions of dollars and creating a company worth tens of billions of dollars? With his rock star looks and growing success, Adam was living a lot of people's fantasy, including a lot of people in that audience. This was tapping into a community of entrepreneurs, tapping into...

kind of the new economy disrupting one of the largest asset classes in the world. What could go wrong? Coming up on this season of We Crashed.

When you have what is arguably one of the smartest investors in the world saying that you're not being crazy enough, it's hard not to believe that their love is warranted and justified. Like to remind me that Ted Bundy was charming. I generally believe he thought he was building something great. I think Elizabeth Holmes thought she was building something great. When we drove from 17 to 40 billion, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. And all of a sudden, Rebecca was everywhere.

It's hard for me to climb into Adam and Rebecca's heads without really simplifying it from the way I see it, which is that they got rich. Who does this? Do all the people at Deloitte go, duh? Lloyd. Duh. Lloyd. Right? Or Goldman. Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs. Nobody does that. Nobody does that. It's weird. It's just so weird. You're not elevating anyone's consciousness, buddy. You're running a fucking desk.

From Wondery, this is episode one of six of We Crashed, The Director's Cut. A story about what happens when idealism and greed run headlong into business reality. I'm your host, David Brown. Natalie Robamed wrote this story. Heather Schwering reported this story. Our producer is Melissa Duenas. Associate producer, Caleb Bissinger. New reporting fact-checked by Marsha McLeod.

Managing producer is Letha Pandya. Sound design by Jake Gorski and James Morgan. Additional production assistance by Daniel Gonzalez. Our consultants are Corey Weinberg for the information and Scott Galloway. Additional reporting by Sarah Kessler. Music supervisor Scott Velasquez for Friesan Sync. Executive producers are George Lavender, Jenny Lauer-Beckman, Marshall Louis, and Jen Sargent. Created by Hernan Lopez. For Wondery.

You can binge the entire series exclusively and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. In the fall of 1620, a battered merchant ship called the Mayflower set sail across the Atlantic. It carried 102 men, women, and children, risking it all to start again in the New World.

Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of American History Tellers. Every week we take you through the moments that shaped America, and in our latest season, we explore the untold story of the pilgrims, one that goes far beyond the familiar tale of the first Thanksgiving.

After landing at Cape Cod, the Pilgrims forged an unlikely alliance with the Wampanoag people who helped the Pilgrims survive the most brutal winter they'd ever known, laying the foundation for a powerful national myth. But behind that story lies another, one of conflict.

Betrayal and brutal violence against the very people who helped the Pilgrim survive. Follow American History Tellers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of American History Tellers The Mayflower early and ad-free. right now on Wondery Plus.