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(Bloomberg) -- Steve Schwarzman has doubts. So does Larry Ellison.
And so, too, do the growing numbers of Wall Street bankers and investors who are all anxiously awaiting the next move by WeWork and its brash co-founder, Adam Neumann.
Neumann was a no-show this week for a long-planned appearance at a SoftBank Group Corp. three-day retreat in Pasadena, California, according to people familiar with the the matter, a further sign that company executives are hunkering down. Once the WeWork initial public offering was postponed late Monday, organizers knew Neumann’s presence would be iffy, the people said. His planned appearance was rescheduled from the first day of the event at the Langham hotel to the last and then canceled altogether.
In short order Neumann’s office-sharing company has gone from a get-rich story to a you’ve-got-to-be-joking melodrama -- from WeWork to WeWait to, now, WeWorry.
On Sunday, it was reported that some WeWork board members supported removing Neumann as CEO and making him non-executive chairman. CNBC said Softbank chief Masayoshi San supported removing him.
It was a brutal week. First, WeWork’s parent company, We Co., finally conceded that its grandiose plans for going public would have to wait.
Then Schwarzman, one of the most powerful figures on Wall Street, threw shade on the company’s hoped-for valuation, which has already collapsed from upwards of $60 billion to $15 billion -- or lower.
“I sort of went, what? How do you get this?” Schwarzman, the head of private equity giant Blackstone Group Inc., said of the early numbers Wednesday at a luncheon in New York. Ellison, chairman of Oracle Corp., went further, according to Barron’s. He told a group of entrepreneurs at his San Francisco home that day that WeWork is “almost worthless.”
And it only gets worse. In London, two deals for major office buildings that are largely leased out to WeWork started to fray. Back in its hometown of New York, the company made a small round of job cuts. And the Wall Street Journal, examining WeWork’s over-the-top culture, reported that Neumann and his friends smoked marijuana on a private jet en route to Israel last summer -- and left a chunk of the drug behind, spurring the plane’s owner to summon it back.
If all that weren’t enough, Neumann’s own bankers were getting antsy: They were looking to revise a $500 million credit line secured by WeWork stock -- an acknowledgment that those shares appear far less solid than they used to.
New Risks
And, by Friday, Wendy Silverstein, a big name in New York commercial real estate who joined WeWork last year as head of its property investment arm, had left the company. She’s spending time caring for her elderly parents.