Yahoo Finance Former WeWork CEO aims to buy back company. Here's how WeWork fell.
According to a report from the The Wall Street Journal, WeWork (WEWKQ) co-Founder and former CEO Adam Neumann is looking to buy back his company for $500 million. The company suffered after the advent of remote work and filed for bankruptcy in November of 2023.
Yahoo Finance Anchor Madison Mills breaks down the timeline of WeWork's fall and how it arrived at Neumann's $500 million valuation.
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Editor's note: This article was written by Nicholas Jacobino
Video transcript
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MADISON MILLS: WeWork founder Adam Neumann not giving up on the company that popularized co-working spaces while riddled with controversy. The founder now offering half a million dollars to buy the company out of bankruptcy. That's according to the Wall Street Journal. That half a billion dollar offer a far cry from the company's top valuation at $47 billion in 2019. So how did we get here? Let's break it down.
WeWork was founded back in 2010 by Neumann and Miguel McKelvey with the vision to, quote, "Create environments where people and companies come together and do their best work." The company's first office space was around the corner here in Soho in Manhattan. WeWork valuations surpassing $1 billion in 2014, that gave them unicorn status. SoftBank valued the company in a funding round at $47 billion in January of 2019.
Fast forward to August of 2019, WeWork filed for its IPO. Neumann tried and failed to take the company public after its IPO prospectus revealed billions of dollars in company losses year over year. That fallout led Neumann to step down as CEO about a month later. Then, heading into 2020, the pandemic put more pressure on margins as people worked remote rather than from co-working spaces.
WeWork started trading on the New York Stock Exchange following a SPAC merger in October of 2021. On the first day of trading, the company was valued at just over $9 billion. But as losses continued for the company, WeWork became a penny stock, landing the company in bankruptcy status officially filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on November 6, 2023. The stock traded at around $0.84 the day the company filed and has fallen even further. Checking out the stock, right now, looking at about $0.32 there.
