David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…But it’s part of this idea that WeWork, what was that line you said, the community line. I believe this was sincere. He believed WeWork was more than a coworking space. Anytime, if you’ve been in WeWork and you get on the elevator to go up to whatever floor, there is a schedule of events. These events have nothing to do with “business [...].” It is farmer’s markets, it is yoga, it’s stuff like that. He legitimately believed that and he also believed that that was a way to keep customers. Okay, maybe now, my three-person company now is at 20% company, we should maybe have our own space but man, we like it here. Totally. Again, not wrong. It just got so perverted over time. Fast forward to this year. I think in many ways once this came out in the IPO, filing this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We’ve talked about everything that’s happened up until now. In January of 2019, WeWork changes its name to The We Company. In doing so, WeWork did not have the trademark for the name, The We Company. Who had that trademark? Adam had that trademark via an entity he controlled called We Holdings, I believe. WeWork, at Adam’s direction, licensed that name from his own company for $5.9 million. Again, I’m just speechless here. And the defense of Adam Neumann in this—I’m not going to make, by the way, because as I said, this is horrible—the argument was that this was a tax issue. That Adam had created it, it had a value, and if he simply gave it, it’s like you can’t just give your friend a brand new car. You just can’t do it. There’s a tax liability with that, that if you’d simply given it to the company. Now, this is a person who did also have a $500 million loan from JPMorgan. As someone who had taken hundreds of millions of dollars, he could have sucked up the taxes. Again, even if it’s one of those things that the board at the time was willing to do, how nobody was able to flag it and convince everybody internally before it became publicly disclosed is just endless—…

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