Adam Neumann

Tuesday

Henry Hitchings

The rollercoaster ride of the world’s most reckless investor

From our UK edition

For a few days in February 2000, Masayoshi Son was the richest person in the world. A risk-taker and showman, universally known as Masa, he had long been disdainful of Japan’s staid ‘salaryman’ business culture and was riding the wave of dot-com mania. His company SoftBank, founded in 1981, had bet big on the growth of online shopping. The bullish mood didn’t last, and Masa slunk away from the limelight – but only for a while. A techno-optimist, the now 67-year-old has repeatedly reinvented himself, urging doubters to see beyond the immediate: ‘You’re limiting your field of vision to 30 years... Start bold and think 300 years ahead.

Thursday

William D. Cohan

Inside the unlikely return of WeWork’s Adam Neumann

Imagine for a moment you are Adam Neumann, the slick, smooth-talking Israeli-born entrepreneur who took the world by storm thirteen years ago with WeWork, his ultimately failed effort to rethink the way we office. After your start up took a tumble and your IPO failed, you nonetheless walk away with roughly $600 million in cash, plus another $400 million loan, and a new lease on life. You head underground, lick your wounds and claim to be trying to learn from what went wrong, including the relentless overhyping, the mismanagement and the enormous losses that your investors suffered. When you re-emerge, you decide to start again and persuade one of Silicon Valley’s most respected investors to back you. Whoa.

Neumann