Co-working office space provider WeWork has filed for bankruptcy covering its locations in the US and Canada, and in a filing, it said it had liabilities of between $10 and $50 billion.
It’s the latest turn for a company that went from being valued at $47 billion in January 2019 to unsuccessfully attempting an IPO later that year. Investors were unimpressed with a company that counted its founder and CEO, Adam Neumann, as a significant risk factor.
As Elizabeth Lopatto eventually described it:
That paperwork revealed, all in one place, the following things: that Neumann was renting his own buildings to The We Company, that Neumann had secured loans from The We Company, and that to change its name to The We Company from WeWork, the…
