Layoffs hadn’t been announced yet, but signs of belt-tightening were visible: free breakfasts had been reduced at the company’s office in the Financial District. A project manager whom I met for coffee said, “I’m going to yoga after this.” Many employees were wrapping up projects that had already been built, or slipping away for job interviews, or practicing self-care. Early-stage projects had been put on hold. A new chairman, Marcelo Claure, had arrived from SoftBank and made a speech promising “bumpy roads” ahead. I spoke to about a half-dozen WeWorkers, a sampling that was heavily tilted toward the architecture and building sides of the business-the company’s “core offering.” (The employees asked to be anonymous, to shield them from repercussions at work.) They used words like “sombre” and “uncertain” to describe the mood at the company. It seems insane now, but at the time it made so much sense.” There’s not a human being in America who doesn’t look at the number forty-seven billion dollars”-WeWork’s valuation in January-“and not get goosebumps. He brought up the marketing expert Scott Galloway, who has compared cheap capital to a drug. WEED SHOP 2 GAME MS. LADY WIKI SOFTWARE“In retrospect, there’s no way this could have worked,” one employee, a software engineer, told me, sounding weary. WeWork’s chief victims were SoftBank and the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, one of SoftBank’s biggest backers-and, of course, the company’s twelve thousand employees. The Trump Administration is caging migrant children and enabling the deaths of Kurdish civilians. We obsessed over the story, I suppose, because it was a train wreck-and a relatively harmless one, compared with the ongoing catastrophe two hundred miles south, in Washington, D.C. Neumann was pushed out-in a deal that made him a billionaire-and the company was taken over by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, its largest investor, at a valuation well below the thirteen billion dollars that the firm has now put into it. It all crumpled in September, after WeWork’s I.P.O. Everyone in New York seemed to be talking about Neumann, the barefooted prophet of the unicorn era, and about WeWork, the freelancer’s desk-sharing concern that he somehow transformed into the city’s biggest private office tenant, with outposts in thirty-two countries and a private-market valuation bigger than the G.D.P. He used to smoke weed with us.” Somehow, this felt natural. “I know that dude! I grew up with his nephew. “Are you talking about Adam Neumann?” he asked. I was in a wine bar the other day, having drinks with a couple of WeWork employees, when a waiter arrived to take our order.
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