Bloomberg Línea — WeWork (WE), founded by Adam Neumann, has seen its valuation tumble by 80% over the past year, and is now valued at less than $1 billion, having previously reached a valuation of $47 billion thanks in part to a $4.4-billion SoftBank investment.
Following Softbank’s Masayoshi Son’s show of confidence in the company, the office-sharing startup quickly grew globally, but which was followed by a failed IPO attempt in 2019, huge losses for the startup and subsequent financial woes, resulting in WeWork’s board voting to remove Neumann as CEO.
On Monday, Neumann’s net worth, estimated at $1.1 billion in real time by Forbes, surpassed that of the company he founded, and from which he was ousted by investors over his conduct. WeWork, which eventually went public in 2021, had a market capitalization of around $920 million on Monday.
In the last 12 months, the stock has fallen about 80% on the New York Stock Exchange.
In its latest quarterly results, the company said it had achieved positive adjusted EBITDA, for the month of December 2022, a shift from its history of cash burn, as reported by Bloomberg News. CEO Sandeep Mathrani has adopted efforts to cut expenses in order to make a profit.
WeWork suffered a $527 million loss in fourth quarter, much sharper than analysts predicted, and posted revenue of $848 million, also below Bloomberg analysts’ estimates, which had expected revenues of around $859 million.
Neumann, meanwhile, received a $350 million investment in August 2022 from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The money went to Flow, his new startup, which owns and operates residential apartment buildings in the United States.
Since leaving WeWork, Neumann has also entered the cryptocurrency market, and Flow’s financial services arm will include a digital wallet for crypto, Bloomberg News reported last year.