Kriti Mehrotra
Written and directed by Jed Rothstein, Hulu’s ‘WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn’ is a documentary that follows the brutal collapse of WeWork, a company founded by Adam Neumann, with his wife Rebekah, in 2010. They had promised to rescue 21st-century employees from the drabness of single-use offices with the idea of collaboration. But the private real-estate firm faced a disastrous time in 2019, resulting in Adam being forced out of his CEO position. Strangely, his wife was rarely ever mentioned in any of this at the time. So now, let’s find out more about her and their kids, shall we?
Who Is Rebekah Neumann?
Born on February 26, 1978, Rebekah Neumann (née Paltrow), as Gwyneth Paltrow’s cousin, grew up in Bedford, New York, nestled in wealth. After graduating college, Rebekah enrolled in Salomon Smith Barney’s Sales and Trading Program before spending the next five years trying to make it in the entertainment industry. However, when that didn’t work out in the way she’d hoped, she moved back to the East Coast and began searching for enlightenment, only to become a certified yoga instructor soon after. During this time, she met Israeli entrepreneur Adam Neumann through a college friend, who’d met him on a roof, and fell in love with him.
“Rebekah went on that first date with me,” Adam said while talking about the importance of finding a life partner during his commencement speech for Baruch College in 2017. “And within five minutes – now I say five minutes to be nice but it surely took 10 seconds – she looked me straight in the eye and she said, ‘You, my friend, are full of shit. Every single word that comes out of your mouth is fake.'” With that as the origin of their still strong relationship, Rebekah gave Adam a crash course of what she called “the game of life,” which led to them playing it together. They tied the knot in 2008 and went on to have five children, including two sets of twins.
Where Are Adam Neumann’s Wife and Kids Now?
When Adam and Rebekah Neumann began WeWork, she became the Chief Brand and Impact Officer of the We Company, where she basically worked as her husband’s “strategic thought partner.” In other words, apart from being a socialite of sorts and focusing most of her energy on WeGrow, a private school she’d founded in 2017, one of Rebekah’s jobs was to fire people for having a “bad energy.” But despite her efforts as a businesswoman, We Company’s S-1 documents claim that the co-founder never received a salary from them.
As for her relationship with Adam in the office, Rebekah once revealed that they never even tried to separate their personal and professional lives. “We don’t have a line at all between work and life,” she said. But Rebekah added that Adam is her soulmate, which she knew for a fact the second she saw him, even though he was skinny and shaking because he smoked too many cigarettes. Coming to their children, until Rebekah stepped down from her post in September 2019, she made sure that they were involved in her work life as well. “Kids shouldn’t feel like work is something they’re not allowed to peek into,” she stated.
After the WeWork scandal blew up, Adam and Rebekah Neumann were said to be hiding out in the Hamptons to escape the media scrutiny. But then, some reports claimed that they were bouncing around the world on rented jets with the help of nannies and a security team. Ultimately, after spending some time in Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel, where their kids were even enrolled in school, they returned to New York. In the summer of 2020, Forbes reported that Rebekah had repurchased WeGrow and was looking to relaunch it as Student of Life For Life, or SOLFL, pronounced “soulful,” but no developments have since been reported.
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