WeWork’s Adam Neumann Is the Most Talented Grifter of Our Time

This is how the WeWork story ends—for now. The high-flying office-sharing startup, which introduced itself to the world as “a community company” with a mission to “to elevate the world’s consciousness,” is paying its founder, Adam Neumann, more than $1 billion to go away. Meanwhile, the company is so cash-poor that it cannot afford to pay the severances of the 4,000 workers it intends to cut.

WeWork’s free fall from a projected valuation of nearly $50 billion to just $5 billion will likely be taught in business school, immortalized in best-selling books, and debated among analysts for years.  But one thing’s for sure: It has established Adam Neumann, who escaped from the wreckage a billionaire, as a figure of almost mythical monstrousness—like some capitalist chimera of Midas and Houdini.

Neumann spent several years of his childhood living on Kibbutz Nir Am, a communitarian settlement near the Gaza Strip. And he has spent much of, , , and . He told that his kibbutz upbringing molded his vision of WeWork. He has compared the office-sharing company, with its common areas and communal beer, to a “Kibbutz 2.0” and “a capitalist kibbutz.”