Adam Neumann is going to end his effort to buy WeWork. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company’s once-jettisoned founder has changed his mind about trying to regain control of it. “For several months, we tried to work constructively with WeWork to create a strategy that would allow it to thrive,” Neumann reportedly said in a statement Tuesday. “Instead, the company looks to be emerging from bankruptcy with a plan that appears unrealistic and unlikely to succeed.
WeWork got a lot of hype — Vanity Fair reports that Neumann became such a prominent businessman that Donald Trump aide Jared Kushner once enlisted him to tout the opportunities in an “economically transformed” Palestine that would come out of Kushner’s Middle East peace proposal — and it filed to go public in 2019. A few months later, shareholders realized that the hype wasn’t translating into business success, and investor SoftBank paid Neumann $1.