Miamians are no strangers to WeWork, with nine coworking spots strewn from South Beach to Brickell, which pales to New York’s 65 locations, but hey. People pay between $350 to a gazillion dollars a month for “hot desks” (read: WiFi access while sitting on a couch or a communal table) or entire office buildings (read: Amazon potentially taking over the entire 660,000sf WeWork / Lord & Taylor building in Manhattan) so that they don’t have to work out of vagrant-laden Starbucks’.
But with WeWork’s stunningly disastrous IPO that flamed out as a non-starter, WeWork’s fortunes plummeted, going from euphoria to the brink of bankruptcy in a matter of weeks. What was supposed to inject $3 billion into the company turned into zero, plummeting its $47 billion valuation to $8 billion. Investors apparently didn’t like that fabu-maned shaman-bro CEO Adam Neumann sold the word “we” to the company for $6 million, had WeWork buy a $60 million Gulfstream 650 ER to fly his wife around, and pocketed $700 million pre-IPO while the company was losing $219,000 an hour. And while Neumann is now getting a staggering $1.7 billion payout to leave the company completely, WeWork is still a financial dumpster fire.
So who’s left holding the bag for close to $11 billion? Japan’s Softbank, which pumped billions and billions into WeWork, financing their global real estate expansion to almost 600 locations. And who’s the COO of Softbank left picking up the pieces? Marcelo Claure. And where does Marcelo Claure live? In a stunning 9,400sf waterfront home, naturally, on North Bay Road in Miami Beach, along with his beautiful wife and children.
Despite being an actual billionaire from his serial entrepreneurship and being the former CEO of Sprint, Claure, along with his financial SWAT Team, is now combing through almost 600 WeWork leases across the globe trying to figure out what locations to keep, which to jettison, and how to stave off the company’s possible bankruptcy. By all accounts, he’s a financial genius.
Fun fact: Claure is also the Chairman of David Beckham’s budding Miami MLS fútbol (read: soccer) team Inter Miami CF, which is building a training facility in Fort Lauderdale until their Miami stadium complex is ready.
There’s always a Miami connection to, well, everything.
Cover photo: Noah Berger/Bloomberg