How Did WeWork’s Adam Neumann Build a $47B Company?

In L.A., Neumann told his employees that the newly formed We Company would now have three prongs — WeWork, WeLive, and WeGrow — with a single, grandiose mission: “to elevate the world’s consciousness.” As Neumann recently told a person close to the company, he believes that WeWork’s size and scale could put it in a position to help deal with some of the world’s largest problems, like the refugee crisis, saying, “I need to have the biggest valuation I can, because when countries are shooting at each other, I want them to come to me.” Neumann and McKelvey didn’t invent the idea of “co-working” — the New York Times had already devoted an entire article to the concept and the many such spaces that had opened in recent years — but the pair realized there was money to be made from the recession.

Source: nymag.com