Once valued at $47 billion, with its sights set on “elevating the world’s consciousness,” office rental company WeWork will go public Thursday at a more muted $9 billion valuation. That’s got to be underwhelming for the investors who pumped $12.7 billion into the business as it ballooned to become one of the world’s most valuable startups. But there’s one player making out big time: Adam Neumann, the ousted cofounder whose conduct as CEO helped crash the company’s first IPO attempt .
In the years leading up to the planned 2019 IPO, Neumann and cofounder Miguel McKelvey sold nearly $500 million worth of the company’s shares, according to the 2021 book “The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion”; In April 2020, WeWork investor SoftBank terminated its offer to buy $3 billion worth of WeWork shares—including nearly $1 billion of shares from Neumann—citing into WeWork’s governance issues.
Who in their right mind would buy stock in this company