Money Stuff: We Is Sorry About the Weirdness
Well there you go:
That is from the amended initial public offering documents that the We Co., formerly WeWork, filed this morning. I am not going to pretend that this is an industry-leading list of corporate-governance best practices, but it is a meaningful change from the WeWork of a month ago. Founder-CEO Adam Neumann will still control the company through dual-class stock for the rest of his life, but only for the rest of his life; the previous version gave him control from beyond the grave. There will be a bit more board independence and supervision. “Our board has the ability to remove our chief executive officer,” super. Before the IPO, Neumann made some money by buying buildings and renting them to WeWork, while cashing out hundreds of millions of dollars of WeWork stock and somehow selling We the name “We”; now he will knock all that off. It’s all standard-issue 2019-era tech-company governance, which is to say it’s better than August-2019-era WeWork governance but still worse than a normal public company.