Vanity Fair’s headline for a nearly 6,000-word report on WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann is the perfect lure for any lover of the Godbeat. It draws from a remark by a former WeWork executive: “You Don’t Bring Bad News to the Cult Leader.”
OK, I’ll bite, but what type of cult leader is in the spotlight? Jim Jones led more than 900 people to commit “revolutionary suicide” in November 1978, but no CEO — not even Neumann — persuaded the 12,500 employees of WeWork in its prime to do likewise.
Gabriel Sherman, the wunderkind who reported extensively on Roger Ailes of Fox News, brings a comparable focus to the deeply ambitious entrepreneur and his wife, Rebekah Paltrow Neumann. Sherman writes as an aside that Newmann’s wife is a first cousin to Gwyneth Paltrow, and most of the details he provides about her suggests that the two cousins share a taste for holistic gimmicks.
The most amusing detail is that “Neumann assigned WeWork’s director of development, Roni Bahar, to hire an advertising firm to produce a slick video for Kushner that would showcase what an economically transformed West Bank and Gaza would look like.”
Sherman adds: “(Bahar told me he only advised on the video and no WeWork resources were used.) Kushner showed a version of the video during his speech at the White House’s peace conference in Bahrain last summer.”
Sherman never makes clear whether he sought Neumann’s perspective on the many enormities attributed to him. Sherman quotes several anonymous sources, and some by name, and it’s clear he asked WeWork for a corporate response to one employee’s charge of being forcibly kissed and groped by her colleagues.
The theological details of Neumannism are thin. Judging by Sherman’s report, Neumann’s focus was more on living in luxury. But there are some flourishes that sound perfectly like the “Ye shall be as gods” thinking that pops up in 21st-century corporate culture:
Employees were expected to attend Neumann’s weekly Thank God It’s Monday parties and a roving annual retreat called Summer Camp held in different years at an upstate New York compound and an English country estate. The events were one part TED Talk (quantum physicist Michael Brooks gave a lecture) and another part Animal House (employees played beer pong and partied to performances by Florence and the Machine and Two Door Cinema Club).
Until a few years ago, the Neumanns were devout followers of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical faith, and it infused WeWork’s office culture. One employee said key meetings were often scheduled for the 18th of the month because 18 is a sacred number in Kabbalah’s 32 paths to wisdom. Adam encouraged senior WeWork executives to participate in weekly study sessions with his spiritual adviser at the time, Rabbi Eitan Yardeni. “It was a lot about finding your inner peace and purpose,” an executive who attended the meetings recalled.
Neumann’s charisma was intoxicating to be around. “If you had to go to war, you wanted him to be your general,” a former executive said. “His sense of himself is beyond human,” recalled another. Neumann paraded through the office barefoot with celebrities like Drake and Ashton Kutcher and had an unnerving ability to maintain eye contact during conversation, lending him the aura of a guru. “When you’re in a room with Adam, he can almost convince you of anything,” a former employee said. Neumann used mass gatherings to spread his gospel. “I think the thing that all of us know is that if you want to succeed in this world you have to build something that has intention,” he said on stage at Summer Camp in 2013, his hair pulled into a ponytail. “Every one of us is here because it has meaning, because we want to do something that actually makes the world a better place. And we want to make money doing it!” The crowd of thousands exploded in cheers. “So many of the people were young and had never worked in a real company. They bought all of it,” a former senior executive said. “I realized after I got there it was a cult.”
The candid addition of “And we want to make money doing it” after “we want to do something that actually makes the world a better place” improves on an aphorism of comic villain Gavin Belson on HBO’s Silicon Valley (“I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do”).
The one other peek into whatever spirituality existed at WeWork comes in this segment about Rebekah Paltrow Neumann, including her remarkable faith in children’s abilities:
Executives wondered why the marketing consultant Jonathan Mildenhall, whom WeWork hired to help develop its brand, was also advising Rebekah on her personal image. (He asked her questions like, “Are you a magician, maverick, or a muse?” said an executive who participated in the session.) At company events, Rebekah interviewed luminaries like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Red Hot Chili Peppers front man Anthony Kiedis.
Crossing Rebekah had consequences. SoulCycle cofounder Julie Rice, who’d been recruited to WeWork in 2017 to become the company’s chief brand officer, quit in part because Rebekah decided upon returning from maternity leave that she wanted Rice’s title and took it, sources said. (A source close to Rebekah said that Rebekah, as a WeWork cofounder, had always had that title.) Last year, Rebekah fired a mechanic for WeWork’s Gulfstream, two executives told me, because she didn’t like his energy.
In the fall of 2018, Rebekah opened WeGrow, a for-profit school costing up to $42,000 a year, at WeWork’s headquarters. “We couldn’t find the school that we felt would nurture growth,” she told Fast Company, explaining how she got the idea to create a school for their five children. Rebekah had very specific ideas of what the ideal environment would be. “These children come into the world, they are very evolved, they are very special. They’re spiritual,” she told Fast Company. “They’re all natural entrepreneurs, natural humanitarians, and then it seems like we squash it all out of them in the education system.”
Nothing in Sherman’s report is essential reading. Neumann came nowhere near his purported dream of “wanting to be elected president of the world, live forever, and become humanity’s first trillionaire,” and WeWork did not treat all the world like the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh treated the town of Antelope, Ore. But as a warning about how geysers of money can warp a person’s soul, Sherman’s reporting is worthwhile.
Photo of Adam Neumann at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017 by Noam Galai/Getty Images, posted by TechCrunch on Flickr