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$47 billion.

That was the peak valuation of WeWork in early 2019. Today, the company is worth around $52 million. To put that in perspective, that’s about 0.11% of its peak value.

WeWork started as a coworking space. At its core, the business was simple: take long-term office leases, redesign the spaces into trendy, amenity-rich workplaces, and then sublease them short-term to freelancers, startups, and even large companies.

High ceilings, kombucha on tap, glass-walled meeting rooms, and community-driven events made WeWork feel more like a movement than just a typical office space.

And for a while, it worked.

By the mid-2010s, coworking was booming. Freelancing was on the rise, startups needed flexible office space, and companies were changing up the rigid 9–5 office model. WeWork positioned itself as the future of work. Its main selling point was not just the workspace but the culture, community, and belonging. The investors loved the idea and poured billions into the company. At its peak, WeWork was the largest private office tenant in New York City, London, and Washington, D.C.

But behind the trendy design and bold vision, the foundation was already breaking apart.

The real weakness in WeWork’s model was that it didn’t want to admit it was a real estate company. The CEO, Adam Neumann, and his team insisted it was a tech company, a “platform for the future of work.” But when you strip away the branding, the business was just signing long-term leases, renovating the buildings, and then subletting the space short-term.

The margins for this are razor-thin compared to owning the property outright. Worse, WeWork was pouring millions into redesigning spaces they didn’t own, leaving them exposed if cash flow dried up. And eventually, it did.

From the beginning, WeWork was never built for sustainability. The company was burning through millions of dollars a week, racking up losses of $2 billion a year. And yet, the money kept coming, because Adam Neumann’s real talent was raising it. Venture capitalists, terrified of missing a big opportunity, wrote check after check.

The numbers didn’t add up, but the story did. At one point, the company was worth $47 billion despite owning almost no assets. When losses mounted, WeWork even tried redefining its own financial metrics, stripping out rent and other major expenses to make the business look “profitable.” For a company whose entire business revolved around paying rent, that was a risky move.

But the crazy part wasn’t even the accounting tricks; it was the self-dealing. Neumann personally bought buildings and then leased them to WeWork, collecting rent while his company shouldered the risk. This is a blatant conflict of interest. He also licensed the word “We” to his own company for $6 million a year.

By the time the IPO collapsed in 2019, the illusion had shattered. Investors saw the staggering losses in the IPO filings, the conflicts of interest, and the culture of excess. Neumann was forced out, though not before negotiating a personal payout worth about $1 billion from SoftBank. Meanwhile, the company laid off thousands of employees.

Then the pandemic dealt the final blow. Remote work gutted demand, and the long-term leases, the very backbone of the business, became a crushing liability.

In 2023, WeWork filed for bankruptcy.

The entire rise and fall of WeWork was built on a simple idea of “Fake it till you make it.”

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