WeWork set to undergo a seismic shift with Neumann family’s ouster

Adam Neumann spent some of his final days as WeWork’s chief executive officer the same way he had for countless weekends in recent years: surrounded by family at his house in the Hamptons. With the company’s plan to go public smoldering, his control over the business dwindling and its biggest investor starting to turn against him, Neumann gathered his wife and business partner, Rebekah, and their five kids, piled into a car and drove east to the tony beach community.

As the Neumanns unplugged at sundown last Friday to observe the weekly Jewish ritual of Shabbat, SoftBank Group Corp’s Masayoshi Son was preparing for an ouster. Son’s businesses had more than $10 billion riding on the company in the form of stock and loans. Over the course of a month, financial advisers to WeWork determined that the shares were worth about a quarter of the price SoftBank paid in January. The problem, Son reasoned, was Neumann.