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[Tyrone Slothrop]

You talk about “non-carbonated fraud” that WeWork may have committed. Do you think there will be investigations?

I don’t know. To be fair, I don’t think anyone’s accused them of presenting numbers that were fraudulent. There have been some postings about the way they were classifying expenses. I don’t know that it’s illegal, but the fact that someone took out three-quarters of a billion dollars and you’re going to have 15,000 employees, I would imagine that somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 thought they were going to be millionaires in a couple weeks, and they’re getting zero. There’s going to be a lot of anger toward Adam Neumann. I don’t know how that manifests itself. There’s definitely going to be civil suits. There’s definitely going to be lawsuits. But it will be interesting if an attorney general sees a path to the governor’s mansion by filing some sort of suit. We have not heard the last of this. Adam Neumann fired? He was liberated. This guy just played this perfectly. Could you imagine what his life would be like right now? If he was still CEO? Showing up every day to an office where he had sold $750 million and everybody else was trying to figure out how they were going to pay the rent on the new apartment they had moved into because they thought they had $7 million in We stock?

It really makes you rethink that picture of Neumann walking around barefoot in the middle of the tempest.

Why wouldn’t you be happy? You haven’t even begun to see the anger that will be unleashed on Adam Neumann. He has 15,000 people right now who are stuck cleaning up. They feel like circus clowns shoveling the shit behind the elephant of Adam Neumann. He has taken $750 million and left a toxic-waste cleanup.

Is this a case of self-delusion? Did Adam Neumann believe his own story?

I don’t know. I speak from some experience as a CEO in the ’90s in the internet days: If you tell a 30-year-old male he’s Jesus Christ, he’s inclined to believe you.

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