Adam Neumann

WeWork filed its S-1 on August 14, 2019, carrying a peak private valuation of 47 billion dollars. The offering was withdrawn on September 17, and on September 24 Adam Neumann resigned as chief executive of the coworking company he had co-founded on the premise that community, not office space, was the product.¹

He is now the founder and chief executive officer of Flow, a residential real estate company launched in 2022 that operates branded apartment communities positioned around amenities and a sense of belonging, sometimes described as a "WeWork for living," and applies the same community-centered thesis to rental housing.²

Background

Neumann was born on April 25, 1979, in Beersheba, Israel. Both of his parents graduated from Ben-Gurion University Medical School and divorced when he was seven, and he has said he lived in thirteen different homes by age twenty-two.¹ He had severe dyslexia and reportedly did not read fluently until his family lived in Indianapolis, Indiana, during his mother's oncology fellowship in the United States. Around age eleven he moved to Kibbutz Nir Am, a communal settlement near Sderot on the Gaza border, where shared labor and communal living, and being the only boy bar-mitzvahed on the kibbutz, were formative experiences. Neumann has cited this communal upbringing as the root of his belief that community can be a product.

He served in the Israeli Navy from roughly 1996 to 2001, reaching an officer rank, with some accounts describing five years on a missile boat against a three-year requirement.

Getting started

He moved to New York City in 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks, and attended Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business, dropping out four credits short of a degree and later returning to complete it around 2017. In October 2008 he married Rebekah Paltrow Neumann, a first cousin of the actress Gwyneth Paltrow; they have six children. Rebekah introduced him to Kabbalah in 2009, which became an explicit influence on WeWork's culture. Neumann's first venture was Krawlers, a padded baby-clothing company that generated roughly 2 million dollars in revenue against 3 million in expenses.¹ Though a financial failure, it gave him a warehouse space he was subletting in Dumbo, Brooklyn, with many empty cubicles, and the observation that unused office space was an opportunity.

What he built

Neumann met his future co-founder Miguel McKelvey, an architect raised on an Oregon commune, at a Tribeca rooftop party. In 2008 the two co-founded Green Desk, a sustainability-branded coworking space in Dumbo, and sold it in 2009 for roughly 3 million dollars.¹ Neumann and McKelvey concluded that tenants were drawn less by the sustainability angle than by a feeling of community, and that reframing became the founding insight for WeWork.

They co-founded WeWork in 2010; the name was reportedly coined by talent agent Andrew Finkelstein, and developer Joel Schreiber made an early 15 million dollar investment for a 33 percent stake. The first location opened in SoHo in April 2011. WeWork raised rapidly: about 430 million dollars at a 16 billion dollar valuation in March 2016, 4.4 billion dollars from SoftBank's Vision Fund in August 2017, and a further 2 billion from SoftBank in January 2019 that pushed the valuation to a peak of 47 billion dollars.¹ SoftBank's cumulative investment eventually exceeded 10 billion dollars.

On August 14, 2019, WeWork filed its S-1 for an initial public offering. The filing exposed governance concerns, including transactions between Neumann and the company, dual-class supervoting stock, and Neumann leasing his own real estate to WeWork, along with an unresolved path to profitability and a mismatch between roughly 47 billion dollars in future lease obligations and about 4 billion in lease commitments. The offering was withdrawn on September 17, 2019, and Neumann resigned as chief executive on September 24 as SoftBank took control.³ SoftBank gave him an exit package reported at roughly 1.7 billion dollars and later wrote down about 9.2 billion of its investment. WeWork filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2023 and emerged in May 2024, with Yardi Systems taking a 60 percent stake; Neumann's reported bid to reacquire the company was rebuffed.²

How he operates

Neumann's method centers on scaling belief and mission language, often tied to Kabbalah through Rebekah's influence, alongside or ahead of operational detail. He has said, "I noticed that in the Kabbalah community, people were really helping each other. I wanted to translate that into business." His confidence has been a signature: at a 2010 real estate conference he predicted WeWork would surpass JPMorgan Chase as the largest office leaser in New York, and he once told a skeptical landlord, "Your building is empty. What do you know about real estate?"¹ His kibbutz-derived communal instincts carried into WeWork's culture of shared amenities and "we" branding. Across WeWork and Flow he has repeated a consistent pattern, reframing a legacy real estate category around community rather than the physical asset, a return to the same thesis, carried into a new company rather than back into the old one.

Where things stand

Neumann is not involved with WeWork following its 2023 bankruptcy and 2024 restructuring. He continues to build Flow, which raised a widely reported 350 million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz, announced in August 2022 at close to a 1 billion dollar valuation and described at the time as the firm's largest single check. As of 2025 Flow reportedly operated around six properties in Florida, with reporting also describing expansion interest in Saudi Arabia. Forbes estimated his net worth at 2.2 billion dollars as of February 2024.²

Key facts

• Co-founded WeWork in 2010 and built it to a peak private valuation of 47 billion dollars before its 2019 initial public offering was withdrawn within about five weeks of filing.
• Resigned as chief executive in September 2019 amid governance concerns and later received a SoftBank exit package reported at roughly 1.7 billion dollars.
• Sold the coworking space Green Desk for about 3 million dollars in 2009, an exit that seeded WeWork's "community, not space" insight.
• Launched Flow in 2022, backed by roughly 350 million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz at close to a 1 billion dollar valuation, before significant scaled product.
• Dropped out of Baruch College four credits short of a degree and returned years later to complete it around 2017.