Adam Neumann Sells Water to the Ocean: A Study Guide

Adam Neumann Sells Water to the Ocean: A Study Guide

A Study of “The Wildly Appealing, Totally Doomed Future of Work”

By Ian Bogost

Hipster Ethos

The essay’s author begins with a vivid description of the pretentious hipster vibe at WeWork office spaces. He writes:

That’s how people refer to them, if you didn’t know. “Oh, it’s a WeWork,” your friend at the lifestyle-media company or the stealth-mode tech start-up might tell you when you meet for mezcal negronis before you both go back to the office for two more hours. WeWork dizzily combines every trend in contemporary white-collar life: the “creative office space” vibes of advertising agencies and dot-com firms, the dark wood and chic-shanty vibes of today’s modish eateries. Its snack options—protein parfaits and dried seaweed—split the difference between manospheric “fuel” and campy “healthfulness.” Indulgence mates with generativity; tenants can get an IPA on draft, but only four glasses a day, a ceiling that betrays the ideal age and liver condition of the WeWork laborer.

Situated in its offices’ phone pods and nap rooms, Scotch-swilling Mad Men have been reimagined as swarthy, be-flanneled lumberjacks and jills, even though they are really just knowledge workers: front-end developers and social-media managers and the like. WeWork democratizes the all-inclusive, cruise-ship workplace style that helps giant companies like Google keep people at work by keeping them happy. At the WeWork that houses The Atlantic’s San Francisco bureau, a neon-pink sign once hung, reading: do what you love. What you love is working, isn’t it?

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Having cool stuff makes Adam Neumann look appealing and hip, and this feeds the narrative of Neumann being a good guy with your best interests in mind, but in reality, he is a fraudster or a grifter.

Selling Water to the Ocean

So what is the grift? To begin, a grifter is a fraud who hustles people. A grifter is a premier salesman. I had a student who told me he was such a good salesman he could sell water to the ocean.

This is what Adam Neumann did. He sold water to the ocean. He had no secret sauce, no innovation, no invention. All he did was sell office space. Shared office space has existed for rent since 1989. As we read:

Co-working, the service WeWork provides, is just a fancy name for a shared office. It has been around for ages—the multinational Regus has rented offices by the month and conference rooms by the hour since 1989, for example. But in 2005, the software engineer Brad Neuberg reinvented the idea for the burgeoning tech economy. Co-working fused the individualism of tech bootstrapping with the collectivism of social movements. Offices got sharded into realms as small as one desk—every founder his own sovereign, but all contributing to that great collective: entrepreneurship.

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So, then, what was Neumann selling? He was selling a lifestyle, a promise of connection and meaning, and the hope for self-actualization, but this was all words and seduction. People believed Neumann’s BS. They fell into Groupthink and became sheeple gullible enough to drink the Kool-Aid from a grifter.

Full Service

Part of the appeal of WeWorks is that these shared office spaces were “full service,” so that a new business could move right in without worrying about building infrastructure. As we read:

Unlike most earlier co-working spaces, WeWorks provide operational services—not just catering and reception, but also financial, legal, IT, and all the other plumbing that makes it arduous to start and run a business. This full-service offering appeals to companies large and small, fledgling and flush. Your middle-class Facebook friend with the lifestyle business might have signed on, but so did Slack, a $12 billion public company. WeWork allows both of them to reduce their capital outlay, decrease their operational complexity, and outsource the risks of a physical plant—to one service provider.

The Grifter Spends More Than the Company Makes

Adam Neumann used the company as his personal bank while preaching smart business practices to the world. He was such a reckless figure that he was kicked out of his own company. As we read:

This promise helped WeWork swell into a real-estate behemoth. It employs 12,000 people and occupies more than 20 million square feet of office space; last year it became Manhattan’s largest private tenant. The firm, now rebranded The We Company, has raised more than $12 billion in capital and until recently was valued at $47 billion. But in the last year alone, it incurred losses of almost $2 billion; over the past week the company’s valuation was cut to $20 billion, its IPO was postponed, and its co-founder Adam Neumann stepped down as CEO. Profits have eluded the company; now prophets do too. The boutique agencies and app-devs and even unicorns can save costs by outsourcing office services to WeWork, but eventually someone has to pay for all those things. As my colleague Derek Thompson put it, companies like WeWork have been “selling magic shows at a science fair.”

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Distracting and Gaslighting with Nonsense Talk About “Energy and Spirituality”

Neumann didn’t want to talk about hard numbers with his accounting team or the public. He wanted to give inflated earnings, inflated company value, and spout a bunch of BS about how he didn’t care about money, how he only cared about good “energy and spirituality.” Meanwhile, he settled with the company when he exited with over a billion dollars, an amount so high that when the company dissolved, all the of workers who were preached “energy and spirituality” got a big ZERO for their severance pay. As we read:

Adam Neumann’s overblown vision for The We Company is both the source of its success and the cause of its problems. Neumann has cited “energy and spirituality” as more relevant metrics for its potential on public markets than measures of its revenue and losses. The company was supposed to reinvent work itself, after all. Neumann’s leadership oversaw massive, rapid growth for the company—but it also seems to have been motivated largely by personal benefit rather than spiritual enlightenment.

The We Company’s Form S-1 outlined a labyrinthine ownership scheme that would have given Neumann more than half of the company’s voting power. Multi-class stock has caused problems for Facebook, Google, and other tech firms, but Neumann’s attitude was more brazen. He used his authority as CEO to pay himself $5.9 million for rights to use the new name, a change he had championed (he later returned the money under pressure of scrutiny before the IPO). He poured tequila shots for employees after announcing layoffs. He bought stakes in real estate that WeWork later leased. He declared WeWork “meat-free” by fiat in 2018, but failed to outline what that meant for its hundreds of offices and thousands of tenants. Rebekah Neumann, a WeWork co-founder and its former CEO’s wife, served as both brand chief and impact officer—a title that underscores the company’s proselytic ambitions—and also as CEO of The We Company’s private elementary school WeGrow, which is charging $42,000 in tuition for this school year (I swear I am not making this up).

Both Adam Neumann and another WeWork co-founder, Miguel McKelvy, grew up, in part, in cooperatives. Neumann spent time on an Israeli kibbutz, and McKelvy on an Oregon commune. Some have speculated that those backgrounds helped draw them to co-working as a business, evangelizing collaboration through collectivism for the digital age. But Neumann, who has reportedly declared that he wants to live forever, has acted in a way that betrays his distaste for common goals and benefits—or at least an interest in them only insofar as they accrue wealth, power, and influence back to him. There’s another name for that kind of collective: It’s called a cult.

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Workism is a cult that is based on diverting the employees’ attention from their true work and financial status as they get seduced into a narrative about finding culture, connection, meaning, and self-actualization, a phony narrative that they curate on social media. 

This narrative is complete BS and Adam Neumann is one of recent history’s most successful BSers, a billionaire laughing at those he duped.