Business Maverick: WeWork’s Adam Neumann Is in the Race of His Life as His Fortune Sinks with the IPO

But by the time the company’s Gulfstream G-6 touched down outside New York late Tuesday night, the grandiose ambitions of Adam Neumann, the company’s brash co-founder and pitchman, remained poised on a knife’s edge. His own fortune, while still enviable, was rapidly slipping away.

At the same time, WeWork is considering changing various corporate governance practices, according to people with knowledge of the situation.With so much up in the air, WeWork planned to hold a town hall-style meeting for employees at its New York headquarters on Thursday. But executives called off the event, citing scheduling conflicts, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

He also has been criticized for borrowing the firm’s money, leasing properties he owns back to the company and selling chunks of equity ahead of the planned IPO. The firm rents space in four buildings owned by Neumann, according to the prospectus. It signed a lease on three of them the day he obtained his stake, and committed to being a tenant in them within the next year.

Still, that’s nothing to sneeze at, particularly for someone who spent part of his childhood on a kibbutz. Neumann moved to New York from Israel in 2001 to have fun and make a lot of money, as he put it in a commencement address at Baruch College, his alma mater. Then he met Rebekah, his future wife, who’s listed in a prospectus as a co-founder, chief brand and impact officer, and a “strategic thought partner.

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