4,700 億ドルの惨事: アダム・ニューマンがいかにして WeWork を 33 日間で潰したか

元の英語の文字起こし。タイトル、要約、FAQは翻訳済みです。完全なナレーションは、YouTubeの字幕でお使いの言語でご利用いただけます。

29年8月14日、ウィーワークは470億ドルの評価額でIPOを申請した。

33日後、IPOは消滅した。創設者は解雇された。そしてソフトバンクは会社を存続させるためだけに、緊急救援金として50億ドルを電信送金しなければならなかった。

This is how a yoga instructor turned a sublease business into a forty seven billion dollar bubble. How that bubble burst in six weeks. And how he walked away one point seven billion dollars richer while fourteen thousand of his employees lost everything.

WeWork raised nearly thirteen billion dollars from investors. It had operating losses of one point nine billion. It paid its own founder rent on buildings he personally leased to the company. It bought the trademark on the word "We" from him for almost six million dollars. By August twenty nineteen, Wall Street had given Adam Neumann a forty seven billion dollar valuation. By October, that number was eight billion. The crash wiped out fifty five percent of SoftBank's Vision Fund quarterly profit. It triggered the largest sub-prime real estate exposure since two thousand and eight. It bankrupted seven billion dollars worth of landlord rent obligations. And it ended with one of the most lopsided exit packages in modern corporate history.

This is the story of how WeWork happened. And how it ended.

Brooklyn, two thousand and eight. The world is in financial collapse. A twenty nine year old Israeli ex Israeli Navy officer named Adam Neumann has just lost a baby clothes business. He is six foot five, charismatic, broke, and looking for the next thing.

He partners with an Oregon born architect named Miguel McKelvey. Together they sublease a single floor of a struggling Brooklyn warehouse for five thousand dollars a month, divide it into desks, and rent each desk back out for three hundred and fifty. They call it Green Desk. The math is simple. They are arbitraging cheap real estate against expensive talent. By two thousand and ten they have flipped Green Desk for a small profit and used the money to launch a new company. They call it WeWork.

The pitch is not about real estate. The pitch is community. Neumann tells investors WeWork is going to elevate the world's consciousness. He says it like he means it. Some investors find it ridiculous. Others find it intoxicating. The first space opens in Manhattan. Then five more. Then twenty.

In two thousand and seventeen Neumann meets Masayoshi Son, the chairman of SoftBank. The meeting lasts twelve minutes. Son writes a check for four point four billion dollars on the spot. He tells Neumann the only criticism he has is that Neumann is not crazy enough. Be crazier, Son says. Make it bigger. Make it ten times bigger. Neumann takes the advice.

By two thousand and eighteen, WeWork is the largest private tenant in Manhattan, in London, in Washington, and in Tel Aviv. It has spaces in twenty seven countries. It has fifteen thousand employees. And it has Adam Neumann, who is now functioning less like a CEO and more like a movement leader.

There were tequila shots in board meetings. Not metaphorically. Literally. Neumann would crack open a bottle of Don Julio nineteen forty two during business reviews and pour rounds for the executives. There was a private jet, a Gulfstream G six fifty, that Neumann reportedly used to fly cannabis between countries. There was the company credit card that paid for personal real estate, including a mansion in the Hamptons. There was Rebekah Neumann, Adam's wife and a co founder, who reportedly fired employees on the spot for not having the right energy.

The company kept buying things that had nothing to do with co working. A wave pool company. A private elementary school called WeGrow that Rebekah ran. A surf school. A management consultancy. They bought the brand of cookies sold at WeWork lobbies. They bought the brand of seltzer water. They bought the trademark on the word "We" itself, from a holding company that Neumann personally owned, for five point nine million dollars in WeWork stock.

The financial picture made no sense. WeWork was leasing buildings on fifteen year contracts and renting them out on month to month memberships. When the economy turned, the leases stayed. The members would not. Every analyst at every bank could see this. But every analyst at every bank also wanted in on the IPO. So they did what bankers do. They invented new metrics. The most famous was a number called community adjusted EBITDA. It was earnings, minus the cost of running the buildings, minus the cost of the staff, minus marketing, minus rent. In other words, profit if you ignored basically every expense involved in operating a coworking company. By community adjusted EBITDA, WeWork was profitable. By any normal accounting standard, it was hemorrhaging.

In late January two thousand and nineteen, SoftBank led another round. Two billion dollars. The valuation was forty seven billion dollars. WeWork was now worth more than twenty seven of the thirty largest publicly traded REITs. It was worth more than American Airlines. It had four hundred million dollars in cash and was burning two hundred and fifty million dollars per quarter. Goldman Sachs told Neumann they could take it public at ninety six billion. JPMorgan said sixty billion. Morgan Stanley said somewhere in between.

The IPO machinery began to assemble.

On August fourteenth, two thousand and nineteen, WeWork filed its S one with the SEC. The document was three hundred and fifty pages. Wall Street read it overnight. By morning, every research desk in Manhattan was sending the same memo to clients.

Stay away.

The losses were not just large. They were structural. One point nine billion dollars of operating losses on one point eight billion of revenue. The growth rate was slowing while the burn rate accelerated. The lease obligations stretched out forty seven billion dollars over fifteen years. WeWork had committed to paying landlords more than its own peak valuation, on contracts it could not exit.

Then there was the related party section. Adam Neumann had personally bought four office buildings and was leasing them back to WeWork. The trademark deal for the word "We" was disclosed in writing. Investors realized that Neumann had been treating his own company as a personal financial vehicle. There were governance issues. The board had no way to remove him. He held a special class of voting stock with twenty votes per share. He could sign documents on behalf of the company without anyone else's signature. He had named his wife as the person who would choose the next CEO if he died.

The S one was supposed to convince investors. Instead it convinced them to run.

Within a week, the IPO valuation began to collapse. September fifth, the target was cut to twenty billion. September thirteenth, fifteen billion. By September sixteenth, the entire offering was postponed indefinitely. SoftBank, which had supported the deal for years, began quietly trying to push Neumann out. The board, which had previously been a rubber stamp, started meeting without him.

On September twenty fourth, Adam Neumann was forced out as CEO. On September thirtieth, the IPO was officially withdrawn. Six weeks after filing, the offering was dead. WeWork had cash to last five weeks at its current burn rate.

In October, SoftBank delivered the rescue. Five billion dollars in new debt and equity, plus a three billion dollar tender offer for existing shareholders. The valuation was set at seven to eight billion dollars. Eighty four percent below the peak. Some employees who had stock options that had vested above thirty dollars per share watched them become worth nothing in real time.

Neumann's exit package was negotiated separately.

He kept his existing stock. He received a one hundred and eighty five million dollar consulting fee. He sold an additional nine hundred and seventy million dollars in shares back to SoftBank under the tender offer. SoftBank also paid off his personal loans, which had been collateralized by his now nearly worthless WeWork stock. By the time the dust settled, Adam Neumann had walked away with approximately one point seven billion dollars in cash and stock.

That same quarter, WeWork began the layoffs. Two thousand four hundred people in November. Another four thousand in early twenty twenty. Total job losses across the year and the pandemic that followed reached approximately fourteen thousand. That was ninety percent of the workforce.

Then the pandemic arrived.

The fundamental thesis of WeWork, that companies needed shared physical office space, evaporated overnight. Members did not return. Lease obligations did. WeWork went public anyway, in October twenty twenty one, through a SPAC merger at a nine billion dollar valuation. The stock fell continuously for two years. On November sixth, two thousand and twenty three, WeWork filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy. The total amount of unpaid rent obligations passed thirteen billion dollars. Property owners across forty cities ate seven billion dollars in losses on the broken leases.

SoftBank, by the end of twenty twenty, had taken nine point two billion dollars in writedowns on WeWork. It was the largest single venture capital loss in the firm's history.

Adam Neumann started a new company in twenty twenty two. It is called Flow. It is, again, in the residential real estate business. The valuation at launch was one billion dollars. Andreessen Horowitz led the round with three hundred and fifty million dollars. The pitch deck reportedly emphasized community. Neumann is, again, the CEO. He has, again, special voting rights. He has, again, a trademark structure where the company's brand is owned by a personal holding entity.

The framing of the WeWork story has shifted over time. For a while it was a cautionary tale about excess. Then it was a documentary. Then it was a TV show. The general public lessons were always presented as if they were about Adam Neumann personally, about charisma run amok, about Silicon Valley losing its mind. They are not.

What WeWork really was, was a series of decisions made by professional investors with full information.

SoftBank's Masa Son did not get tricked. He told Neumann to be crazier. Goldman Sachs did not get fooled. They quoted ninety six billion to win the IPO mandate, knowing the math did not work. The board members who handed Neumann a special class of voting stock were not naive. They were taking a calculated bet that they could ride a hype cycle and exit before the structural problems mattered.

The fourteen thousand employees who lost their jobs did not get to make that calculation. They paid for everyone else's bet. The landlords who built out custom buildings paid. The pension funds that owned WeWork shares through index inclusion paid. Adam Neumann did not. The institutional investors did not. SoftBank, in financial terms, paid the most. But Masayoshi Son still has Vision Fund Two. Adam Neumann still has Flow.

This is the receipt of WeWork. The valuation went from forty seven billion to zero. The founder went from broke to billionaire. The workers went from employed to unemployed. And the structures that made it all possible, the dual class shares, the related party transactions, the community adjusted metrics, the seven year lockups for non founders, are all still standard practice in venture capital today.

Five years later, almost no laws have changed.