You have said that the real story of what happened to WeWork has not been fully told. What is the piece of it that most people do not understand?

Adam Neumann
Replied byAdam Neumann

Founder & CEO at WeWork

Niche: Marketplace
Revenue: Not Publicly Disclosed/month
Location: Miami, Florida, USA
Started: 2021

In March 2018, before the IPO, before any of the public chaos, Masa offered to buy the company for 20 billion in cash. Ten billion to the investors, ten billion on the balance sheet for us to build together. I would keep a 30 percent stake that would grow to 51 percent when we hit goals. The deal was extraordinary. Every investor was going to make money many times over their investment. But two board members from Benchmark created a special committee and negotiated that 20 billion deal from March all the way to December while the company was losing two billion a year. They thought they could push it to 32 billion. By December Masa could no longer do a 20 billion all-cash deal because SoftBank's stock was down. That delay cost everyone everything. We then found ourselves forced to go public when we were not ready. That is what actually happened.

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