Was Adam Neumman on a surf trip as WeWork prepared for IPO?

Reports have emerged that Adam Neumman was busy holidaying and relaxing in The Maldives ahead of the failed IPO attempt. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, the embattled former CEO of WeWork was once too busy surfing to go through WeWork’s IPO paperwork that he had an employee journey down to The Maldives just to bring him up to speed with the tech giant’s IPO paperwork.

While WeWork’s executives were burning the midnight oil to finalize a deal that would have secured the firm’s co-founder and CEO billions, Adam Neumman decided to take an early holiday perhaps to celebrate the victory that was to come. But according to The Wall Street Journal’s Maureen Farrell, Liz Hoffman, Eliot Brown and David Benoit, most of WeWork’s IPO preparations were made at the home of the former CEO, Neumman.

According to WSJ’s anonymous sources, it was at Neumman’s Hamptons home that two rival stock exchange heads were invited and asked to pledge their support to environmental conservation, including eliminating single-use plastics and meat. At the time, both Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange were competing for WeWork’s listing.

However, in one instance, Adam Neumman was miles away from Hamptons. Reluctant to cut short his trip to the Indian Ocean Island, WeWork had to burn thousands of dollars to travel to the former CEO’s holiday destination, just for a brief.

Neumman’s vacation coincided with the company’s critical stages of the IPO process, an undertaking that was set to scoop the company as high as $20 billion from new investors. In the end, Neumman and his team presented an S-1 prospectus that painted a picture of a company marred with snowballing losses.

Neumman had developed a liking for the finer things in life at the expense of the company he co-owns.

WeWork deposited fat cheques in the former CEO’s bank accounts for rented office buildings that belonged to him, paperwork filed in August revealed. But he didn’t stop at that – he also trademarked the word “We” and went ahead to award himself $6 million as compensation for using the word, an amount he eventually surrendered back to the company after facing criticism from various quarters.

WeWork’s IPO has since been shelved and Adam Neumman was forced out of the company after a buyout by Japan’s conglomerate bank, SoftBank.