He personally trademarked the word “we” and then sold it to his company for 5 million dollars. He also owned a lot of the buildings the company had signed absurdly long leases on. It was literally a company set up with the sole intention of funneling VC money into his pocket directly. Even for the shady-ass world of start ups and VC firms what he did was pretty blatant. That’s not even getting into how he portrayed the company as a tech start up when it just simply was not. It’s like how Tesla and Ford sell about the same number of cars but Teslas market cap is 17x higher because they call themselves a tech company. At least with Tesla you could probably argue they were a tech company at some point early on, WeWork was never a tech company at all. Neumann got his start renting the spare office space he had after his previous company failed and just decided to run with it.
He personally trademarked the word “we” and then sold it to his company for 5 million dollars. He also owned a lot of the buildings the company had signed absurdly long leases on. It was literally a company set up with the sole intention of funneling VC money into his pocket directly. Even for the shady-ass world of start ups and VC firms what he did was pretty blatant. That’s not even getting into how he portrayed the company as a tech start up when it just simply was not. It’s like how Tesla and Ford sell about the same number of cars but Teslas market cap is 17x higher because they call themselves a tech company. At least with Tesla you could probably argue they were a tech company at some point early on, WeWork was never a tech company at all. Neumann got his start renting the spare office space he had after his previous company failed and just decided to run with it.