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The premise of Son’s investment was that WeWork could do much more than rent desks to solo accountants and small branding firms. Since its early days, Neumann had called WeWork “the world’s first physical social network,” and as he put it to me this spring, the company’s SoftBank-funded losses were merely laying the groundwork for all kinds of growth. “We’re investing money in building an infrastructure that tremendous revenue already flows on. And there’s an endless amount of revenue that can flow on it,” he said. Neumann has claimed multiple times that WeWork is at the stage Amazon was at when it sold only books. The idea is to build a machine capable of leasing, designing, building, and managing space at an unprecedented scale, on top of which various kinds of moneymaking enterprises can be built. The results thus far have been fitful. As one example, the company has long tried to sell services to its members, such as health insurance and business software, but today this accounts for just 5 percent of its revenue.

The company’s valuation has also been based on the notion that it is, if not quite a tech company, at least a technologically forward-thinking one. Even WeWork’s rivals admit that its vertically integrated system for opening spaces up has helped it expand at a remarkable speed while keeping its increasing costs in check, relatively speaking. (Being able to buy furniture in bulk helps, as does the company’s avoidance of union labor.)

It has lately been investing more in technology to better understand how people use its space, and Shiva Rajaraman, WeWork’s CTO, described a typical WeWork to me as “an Amazon warehouse with a lot more soul.” The company uses data to improve its management of conference rooms and analyze its customers’ interests to better plan community events. (Rajaraman said the company had found that WeWork members in Brooklyn and San Francisco enjoyed “urban gardening.”) The manager of a WeWork space in Flatiron told me that “one of our best learnings” since opening was that people liked sitting at several desks in the back of the room that were near the windows. This, he said, was something they hadn’t guessed, before admitting it “makes a lot of sense.”

On a practical level, SoftBank’s cash infusion helped WeWork cover the increasing costs of its whirlwind expansion as the real-estate market got more expensive. It also began spending heavily to fill all the desks it was adding. Just a few weeks after SoftBank’s investment, Shlomo Silber, the owner of Bond Collective, a  New York–based co-working company, turned on his phone at the end of Rosh Hashanah to find dozens of his customers had forwarded an email from WeWork offering to buy them out of their leases and give them as much as a year of free rent. WeWork’s occupancy rate went up, but the deals made it difficult to determine the natural demand for its product. WeWork employees in multiple cities told me that savvy companies would take advantage of a few months of free rent in one WeWork, then wait for a new location to open so they could move and take advantage of another deal.

The company’s appetite for growth was rapacious, and for someone who claimed to be building a business around the crunchy concept of community, Neumann had adopted the hard-nosed tactics of a real-estate tycoon. In 2015, a landlord kicked out two tenants’-rights organizations from their offices in downtown San Francisco to make way for WeWork, which reportedly offered to pay double the rent. In 2017, Neumann called an executive at Blackstone, the large investment firm, to complain that it had invested in a rival, and he once told a New York landlord who had leased space to another co-working company that not only did he plan on crushing that company but he would no longer work with the landlord.

WeWork has also accused several of its co-working competitors of trademark infringement, including UrWork, WE Labs, and Hi Work. In a 2017 lawsuit against UrWork, the company said it did not claim “exclusive rights to the ordinary word ‘Work,’ ” but objected to “the combination of a two-letter pronoun followed immediately by the word ‘Work.’ ” Neumann and McKelvey have cited their communal upbringings as formative to WeWork’s conception, but Neumann has also described the kibbutz as “a failed social experiment,” flawed because “everyone made the same amount of money.” WeWork, he says, is a “capitalist kibbutz,” where weakness won’t be accommodated. “On the one hand, community,” he has said. “On the other hand, you eat what you kill.”

One afternoon in May, I visited the new WeWork-designed Soho headquarters of Thrive Global, Arianna Huffington’s company dedicated to “ending the stress and burnout epidemic.” Huffington greeted me and a PR representative from WeWork by saying she had recently spoken to the new boss, whom WeWork had just hired as its head of global communications. “I got to know him when he was representing Travis at Uber over a big crisis,” Huffington, an Uber board member, said, referring to Travis Kalanick, the ride-sharing company’s founder and former CEO, whose brashness eventually became more than Uber could bear. “So a big bond was formed.”

The Thrive office is part of WeWork’s recent effort to move away from leasing space to companies small enough to squeeze into a glass box. More than 40 percent of WeWork’s business is now with companies of more than 500 employees, some of which have entire spaces all to themselves: There are ten WeWork floors in a single Greenwich Village building that are occupied entirely by IBM. Companies can choose to let WeWork outfit their offices in the same general aesthetic as a standard WeWork location or pay more for a bespoke offering called Powered by We. Thrive had chosen the former; its office had several of WeWork’s signature phone booths and a lighter, brighter look, which WeWork introduced under the direction of Adam Kimmel, a former fashion designer who is now WeWork’s chief creative officer. Kimmel told me that WeWork has a team of 50 visual artists, who crank out more than 1,000 pieces per month, but Huffington had decided to decorate Thrive’s space with artwork by her daughter instead.

The We Company’s headquarters in Chelsea, where more than a thousand of its employees work, is something of a testing ground for how it can serve even larger organizations. (The company will eventually move into the old Lord & Taylor flagship on Fifth Avenue, which it recently bought.) The sixth-floor entrance is flanked by a full-service barista and a “living room” with an array of couches and lounge chairs roughly the size and feel of a West Elm showroom. There are Foosball and bumper-pool tables, along with three video-game consoles. Beyond that is the WeMRKT, an “in-office bodega,” as a WeWork spokesperson called it, next to a kitchen with a dozen taps serving beer, cider, cold brew, Merlot, Pinot, several kombuchas, and seltzer.
On one of my visits, signs advertised astrology readings for employees that afternoon.

Aside from a few offices reserved for Neumann and a handful of executives, the headquarters has almost no assigned desks, and some WeWork employees describe a near-constant mental and physical battle to find a space with enough quiet and privacy for concentration. (The private phone booths are coveted, as they are in most WeWorks.) Joel Steinhaus, a WeWork executive, told me that his previous office at Citi allocated 200-to-250 square feet per person, while WeWork has shrunk that number to around 50. (A WeWork spokesperson says the number is higher.) WeWork claims that additional common spaces and amenities make up the difference, but also that closeness has benefits. A half-dozen WeWork employees repeated the same talking point to me about the narrowness of its staircases and hallways, which are there to foster community by forcing people to physically interact with anyone they walk past. They say any cost savings from fitting in more people is merely a bonus.

Building community is what WeWork has always promised, and its pitch to large corporations is not just hip design and flexible leasing terms but what WeWork calls its “WeOS,” referring to its expertise in helping companies optimize both space and overall culture. (In 2017, McKelvey was named WeWork’s chief culture officer, and he’s fond of using one of WeWork’s many internal slogans: “Operationalize Love.”)

But in dozens of interviews, current and former WeWork employees and executives questioned whether the company’s culture is itself one worth spreading. Despite the company’s slogan “Make a Life, Not Just a Living,” employees at all levels have often reported working 60- or 70-hour weeks, and events like Thank God It’s Monday and Summer Camp were mandatory. At its annual summit, the company keeps track of employee attendance at panels and events by scanning wristbands given to each person; excessive absences are reported to managers. A number of employees describe a regular cycle at WeWork: New people would arrive, excited by the company’s mission, only to get burned out, leave, and replaced by a fresh crop. Multiple executives told me Neumann’s cheerleading was critical to the company’s success. “From a business perspective, the cult is working,” said one executive.

Employees say turnover at the company has been dizzying. Multiple people told me Neumann has expressed a desire to turn over 20 percent of WeWork’s staff every year — he denies this — whether through attrition or firings, as a means of keeping staff on its toes. There have been two publicly reported rounds of mass departures, both of which the company said involved culling unproductive workers. But employees say that restructurings, in which entire teams are suddenly disbanded, are a regular occurrence. “When you’re at WeWork, there’s a certain lack of culture, which is ironic for a company selling culture,” one former executive told me. “If there is a culture, it is that of a revolving door.” The need to hire employees at a rate to keep up with its growth has led to occasional hiccups in its hiring process: In 2015, Neumann chastised a group of employees for not Googling a job applicant after finding out that WeWork had hired the Hipster Grifter, a Brooklynite who had become briefly famous several years earlier for scamming her way into jobs and cheating people out of money.

The focus on growth often seemed to leave little room for other concerns. Two people told me that during an early town hall when WeWork had just over 100 employees, Neumann took questions alongside two other executives, Michael Gross and Noah Brodsky, and someone asked about the lack of diversity among the executive team. Neumann disputed the point by referring to himself and the other people onstage, saying, “I’m a brunette, Michael’s blond, and we have a Noah.” (Brodsky, who is gay, went bright red.)

Employees and executives say much of the culture stems from Neumann, whose rule by fiat could be frustrating. Last summer, he announced at the end of a companywide meeting that WeWork employees would no longer be permitted to expense meals that included meat. Several senior members of the company had no idea the announcement was coming or what it even meant. Hundreds of employees joined a Slack channel to debate the policy, while some found various ways around it: A person in the New York tech world said WeWork employees have asked her to expense the meat when they go out for meals.

Especially at the top, WeWork looked to some like a boys’ club. The executive ranks have been sprinkled with Neumann’s friends from Israel as well as his extended-family members. During an executive off-site meeting in Montauk, he gave a joking toast to the virtues of nepotism. In a job interview, the first question one former executive asked a young female applicant was whether she had a boyfriend (he was later fired). Last year, two female employees reported that they were having trouble getting a meeting with Adam Kimmel, the chief creative officer, to whom they reported. According to multiple people with knowledge of the situation, Kimmel later said he hadn’t met with the women because he and his wife, the actress Leelee Sobieski, had a rule against meeting alone with a member of the opposite sex. (WeWork disputes this.) In October, Ruby Anaya, the former head of culture, sued WeWork, alleging she had been groped at both the company summit and Summer Camp by colleagues (the lawsuit is pending).

Several people told me they worried about what the company’s younger employees might absorb from their experience. A former WeWorker who now runs a company told me, “I spend a lot of my time on culture and HR, and it fucking slows you down worrying about how people feel.” But one employee told me his WeWork experience had made him think about what he would do differently if he were ever to run his own start-up. “You can move fast and break things,” he said, citing Facebook’s widely adopted empire-building ethos. “But you can’t move fast and break people.”

One of WeWork’s few female senior executives is Rebekah Neumann, Adam’s wife. Their first date is now part of company lore: Rebekah told Adam, who was still working on Krawlers, that he was “full of shit” and needed to make something of himself. “Rebekah and I are co-founders in life,” Neumann told me. “We met, and she suddenly added to my vocabulary words like ‘The Game of Life.’ ” Rebekah studied business and Buddhism at Cornell and initially chose the former, working as a stockbroker at Smith Barney before going to India to study yoga. (She later tried to follow her cousin Gwyneth Paltrow into acting, but it didn’t stick.) She agreed to marry Adam only if he developed a spiritual practice, and she introduced him to Kabbalah, which he has cited as foundational to WeWork’s creation; he has encouraged members of his executive team to meet with an instructor from the Kabbalah Centre. The Neumanns have five children, and at various company events, Rebekah has extolled the virtues of motherhood while speaking to WeWork’s employees, many of whom she made uncomfortable at last year’s Summer Camp while talking about supporting her husband as his company grew: “A big part of being a woman is to help men manifest their calling in life.”

Rebekah has held various titles at the company; she is currently the chief impact officer and the head of WeGrow, a school on the third floor of WeWork’s Chelsea headquarters, opened in 2017 as a “conscious, entrepreneurial school committed to unleashing every child’s superpowers.” (WeGrow includes the Flatiron School, a coding academy for adults that WeWork acquired in 2017.)

The Neumanns started the school in part because they couldn’t find one suitable for their kids. It costs $36,000 for 3-to-4-year-olds and $42,000 for children up to 11; there are plans to expand through high school. “In my book, there’s no reason why children in elementary schools can’t be launching their own businesses,” Rebekah, who has no background or training in education, said when WeGrow launched. Its head of learning told the Post that the school had identified one student who “just loves to project-manage” and paired her with a mentor in WeWork’s events department.

The third We — WeLive — opened in 2016 with one location in the Financial District and another in suburban Washington, D.C., offering small apartments supplemented with shared amenity spaces. Much as WeWork was born out of the ruins of the recession, WeLive occupied 110 Wall Street, which had flooded during Hurricane Sandy. The company quickly learned that its expertise in commercial office space didn’t neatly translate to the more complicated requirements of a residential building. Neumann insisted as recently as last year that “WeLive is going to be a bigger business than WeWork,” but the concept has struggled. The company once projected that by 2018 it would have 69 WeLive locations. It still only has two. (A third, in Seattle, is slated to open next year.)

WeWork continues to expand in many directions. In 2016, it invested in a Spanish company that makes wave pools for surfers. A year later, it opened a gym called Rise by We (WeRun and WeWorkOut were considered but rejected) managed by Neumann’s brother-in-law, a former professional soccer player in Israel. A second location is opening later this year in the Brooklyn Navy Yard as part of Dock 72, a large new development that will include 220,000 square feet of WeWork space. (While approaching the building on a tour this spring, a WeWork employee had to assure me that a nearby business called We Rub You was “not a WeWork massage parlor”; it sells Korean BBQ sauce.) In January, WeWork opened a space in Flatiron where seats can be reserved for $6 per half-hour, coffee not included. WeWork has invested in a food company that sells a turmeric coffee creamer created by Laird Hamilton, the surfing legend. It also has a stake in a company that produces a keto-friendly coffee creamer, run by Jimmy, Jake, and Jordan DeCicco, three brothers who operate out of a WeWork, rent a three-bedroom apartment in WeLive, and workout at Rise by We.

When I met Neumann in his office, a framed poster on the floor showed what looked to be terraformed cities with the year 2048 written in large type. “I should hide that,” Neumann said, smiling. He couldn’t talk about it right now, but the one thing he could say was that, whatever it was, it was actually going to happen by 2028.

In May, WeWork launched an investment fund called ARK, which would allow the company to begin buying property. (Neumann jokingly told Bloomberg the name stood for “Adam, Rebekah, and kids,” and he didn’t reject a comparison to Noah’s Ark; a spokesman later clarified that it stood for “asset, return, kicker.”) The fund also solved a thorny problem that has recently emerged. Over the years, Neumann has personally owned a stake in four buildings where WeWork became a tenant, including the one occupied by IBM, which he acquired in 2015 with the Israeli fashion designer Elie Tahari for $70 million. (The Neumanns also own a $1.7 million house in the Hamptons; a six-bedroom townhouse in Greenwich Village, renovated to include a “stroller parking garage”; a $15 million, 60-acre estate in Westchester; and four apartments in Gramercy that cost a combined $35 million.) The Wall Street Journal reported in May that WeWork had paid more than $37 million in rent to an unnamed “principal stockholder.”

The arrangement was criticized as a blatant conflict of interest, and with the company moving toward an IPO, Neumann said he would sell the buildings to ARK at cost. “I never bought the buildings to make money,” he told me, claiming he had simply wanted to show skeptical landlords that WeWork was a viable tenant. “My stock makes so much more money than any investment I could do. I should buy more WeWork stock if I want to make money.” Still, Neumann has told people over the years that he has sold more than a hundred million dollars of WeWork stock during various investment rounds. In recent years, he has made personal investments in a number of companies, including a hotel chain for digital nomads, the medical marijuana start-up of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, celebrity chef Dan Barber’s bespoke-seed company, and Life Biosciences, which is dedicated to “a future where age-related decline is not a fact of life.”

Just before last Christmas, Masayoshi Son called Neumann with bad news: A plan for SoftBank to invest $16 billion into WeWork, including $4 billion it had already promised — and to become its majority shareholder — was dead. The stock market had tanked, and the Vision Fund’s investors, including Saudi Arabia, were hesitant to invest more in real estate. SoftBank ended up investing another $1 billion in WeWork, and buying another $1 billion of stock from employees and other investors. This was more money than Neumann’s smaller rivals had raised combined, but it was still a disappointment, and presented as such in the media. At the company summit in January, Neumann told employees that news coming from outside the company was often “fake or misinformed.” (In 2017, he told the Economic Club of New York he thought fake news was “a great term.”)

Will WeWork work? The company has existed entirely in an expanding economy, and its business has never been tested by a downturn. WeWork argues that in a recession, larger companies will downsize into its spaces while laid-off workers will need them to start their solo careers. But it’s also very possible that large companies who currently have ancillary spaces in WeWork will identify those as easy costs to cut, and entrepreneurs will revert to coffee shops. A third argument goes that WeWork occupies so much space that many landlords will have no choice but to renegotiate its leases.

During the dot-com boom, a company called Regus became a stock-market darling by offering similar but much blander flexible offices. In 2000, Fast Company published a story about Regus titled “Office of the Future,” highlighting its efforts to bring “community” to the workplace. But the bubble burst and Regus went bankrupt. The company recovered and rebranded as IWG, but its existence presents another conundrum for WeWork. IWG currently has roughly 3,000 locations and 2.5 million customers worldwide, numbers that dwarf WeWork’s. IWG is profitable and now has a hipper, WeWork-ish offering. It is publicly traded and worth around $3 billion.

Everyone in real estate expects the kind of flexible office space WeWork offers to become an increasingly large part of their world, and many of the company’s rivals are grateful to Neumann for preaching the gospel of co-working and shorter-term leases. Even people critical of WeWork’s culture, or skeptical of its focus on hypergrowth, say it will likely remain a force in commercial real estate. But many, too, have begun to wonder what can explain the $44 billion in valuation difference between WeWork and IWG. In a financial disclosure last year, when it was in the process of losing $1.9 billion to fund its growth, WeWork acknowledged, “We have a history of losses, and we may be unable to achieve profitability at a company level.” It also published a financial metric it called “community-adjusted EBITDA” — earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization, which is an accountant-approved way of measuring a company’s performance — that excluded many costs, like marketing, construction, and design, that WeWork claimed would disappear once it reached maturity, in an attempt to show it could make a healthy profit; the Financial Times dubbed WeWork’s doctored version “perhaps the most infamous financial metric of a generation.” WeWork employees told me they would be happy if the company were worth half of what SoftBank said it was going to be. “Even if it goes down to $5 billion, Adam’s still worth a billion dollars,” one rival said, expressing concern about the perverse incentives of the modern economy. “So from an objective perspective, was it a mistake to take this hemorrhage-inducing risk? You could argue that was the rational mode.”

Back in his office, Neumann remained upbeat. “Before you ask, let’s set an intention,” Neumann told me, after a WeWork spokesperson said I had time for one more question. “Ask a question that has an opportunity to give something to your readers that could make them grow.” I told Neumann I had read a comment of his from 2016 in which he said he was ultimately working toward the creation of a WeWorld, with the various parts of his company forming a broader ecosystem that people would have little reason to leave. I asked if that was still his goal and whether there wasn’t something potentially problematic with that idea. “It’s a good question, so you did very well,” Neumann said. “I don’t think we could single-handedly change the world. I think we can build an organization that can be a catalyst to effecting long-term measurable change. Instead of thinking of it as a WeWorld, let’s just think of … Powered by We. And only Powered by We for the things that want it. Think of it as what we call internally a WeOS. An operating system that makes work better, living better.”

With an IPO on the horizon, he thought the company needed to start doing fewer things better. It was canceling Summer Camp. He wouldn’t pursue WeSail and WeBank, two old ideas that were recently unearthed, despite telling another reporter in January that WeBank was “coming.” (I didn’t get a chance to ask for an update on WeWork Mars.) Neumann was open to change. He even thought he might get his long hair cut short. But he wasn’t giving up on his grandest visions, and he asked a spokesperson to email me an internal company “narrative” he was using to summarize its near-term ambitions. It included the koan “We are captivated by the limitless potential of We.”