Adam Neumann: The cult of WeWork

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Filmio, makノ�� seivoreista. Kuten järjestelmässä. Mikael Mikkelviin on se, että se on takaisin kuten järjestelmässä. Mikael Mikkelviin on se, että se on kuten järjestelmässä. Mikael on se, että se on kuten järjestelmässä. from a million, which seems like a lot to a billion, but let's find out. So Adam and Miguel are told by their landlord when they sell up green desk too, that they are not allowed to start another green desk like company in Brooklyn. So they start looking ahead to Manhattan, the big Apple, the big city. And they come up with this idea called WeWork. And eventually they want to expand it to apartments, to hotels, to banks. But because offices are the thing that they're most comfortable with, WeWork starts as an office. Yeah, so offices where to WeWork, like books where to Amazon, the first commodity, if they can make this work, then maybe you can expand it to other. But in all of these businesses, when you're going, you're talking about the difficulty of going from the unimaginable, from going to a million to a billion, in the trade we call this scale up. Right. And to scale up, you need someone to come along who's got deep pockets. And this is where Joel Shriver comes into the picture, a very important person in this story. So Adam has been going out, impounding on the doors of various investors, asking them, please give us some money so we can make WeWork a thing. And he hits gold with Joel Shriver, who's a real estate developer, who's very well respected in New York. Now, Joel doesn't have buildings to give Adam, but he does have a lot of money. So he asks Adam and Miguel, how much is this hypothetical WeWork actually worth? And Adam and Miguel go away, they confer, and they tell him that WeWork, which at this point does not have a single office, is worth 45 million. And what does Shriver do? He says I'll take 30% of that and give them 15 million bucks. I mean, nice work if you can get it. So the first WeWork opens in 2010 in SoHo with only 17 tenants. So not that many people really, musicians, startups, architects, and it's still quite DIY. So the thing I find most incredible about the first WeWork is that Miguel wires the whole office for Wi-Fi himself. And the head of IT is a high school computer nerd who drops out to work on WeWork. I'm still reeling from the fact that they haven't got a single asset, and they managed to get somebody to give them 15 million dollars. You've got to be one charming so and so to be able to pull that off. And that is kind of the Adam Newman story. It's charming the birds and the trees and the money from investors. And I think the thing that strikes me most about this era of WeWork is that it was considered cool to work at somebody like WeWork. And that's why it attracted so many people in their 20s who were willing to put up with the working conditions. When I speak to it and in my work, I do speak to a lot of very rich people who've made huge empires and all of them sort of talk Mr. I'd about it when it was just me and you Dave and Mr. Pat, a Hugh lit and Mr. Packard. In the corner when we had one printer and one phone and we used to have to go down and take out the garbage and they talk about that much more than they talk about the billions they've made thereafter. And I think this is that moment for WeWork. And why do you think this is a stasier for back when it all began? Even though clearly nobody really joins a company expecting to make IKEA furniture wiring up the internet. Yeah, I think it's because it plays into a romantic notion of you against the world, against massive odds and tells the narrative to the rest of the world. I haven't always been mega rich, you know. I basically built myself up straight from the bottom. It taps into the American dream, it taps into that hard work and gets you there and the skies the limit but actually enjoy the process rather than the exit. And Newman, he later on in his life says, don't work just thinking about the exit, enjoy the moment and he seems to have done that. I mean the Rags to Richie's story is very compelling but at the same time, Adam is out there milking his social circles for cash, right? So at this point in WeWork he starts raising millions from friends, from family. He even rents out a house in the Hamptons to network with rich people even more. And crucially, this is also when he gets with Rebecca Paltrow, now known as Rebecca Newman, a very wealthy New York socialite. So the Paltrow name, everyone's eyes raised, is it the same Paltrow family? Yes it is. And she's Rebecca is a cousin of Guinness and she doesn't hide that fact. And actually she's an important person in this story. Yes, because she actually ends up investing quite a lot of a $1 million nest egg she inherits into Adam's company when WeWorks just starting out. So Rebecca becomes an increasingly important figure in WeWork. She actually gets the title of Chief Branding Officer and starts to ingratiate herself into almost every aspect of the way the company works. And she'll become an important figure later on when the company eventually tries to go public. And so they start raising money. Every time you raise money, you're asked to give a value of the company. So you put money in and say, how many shares? What kind of share of the company are getting for this amount of money? So that's how you can basically chart the value of a company over time. Because each time they raise the money, you have to put a value on it. So in February 2014, the finances say WeWork is worth 1.5 billion. Ding, we've hit that billion dollar. That doesn't last long. Before long, it's 10 billion dollars. 10 billion dollars there by 2016. It becomes what they call a "deca corn". A unicorn is worth 1 billion, a "deca corn" worth 10 billion. And then you've got the big guys coming in. JP Morgan Chase, biggest bank in the world on some measure. Goldman Sachs, smartest guys on Wall Street, they're in. So he really got a lot of momentum now. So what was Adam actually telling these guys to convince them to pony up so much cash? Was it just raw charisma? Was he showing them any kind of figures and profits that were impressive enough to justify that kind of investment? I think there are two things going on. He was saying this is the second biggest asset class of any kind in the world. So the market is worth trillions. What is an asset class? An asset class is a good question. So gold is an asset class. Or precious metals is an asset class. Government bonds, IOUs, that the government issue. That's an asset class. Shares are an asset class. Real estate. All of those things are called asset class. It's like a category. It's a category all on its own. So he said, listen, real estate is, you know, you think about the combined wealth of a country. A lot of it is tied up in bricks and mortar, whether it's commercial or residential. So the market for this is absolutely huge. And that's well known. But there's another thing that's going on right now. We're out in the 2010s. Facebook has been around a little while by now. Valuations for companies are going through the roof. And what he successfully does, and this in a way is the biggest trick he pulls throughout his career. He manages to persuade people. His company is a technology company. Right. And not a good, old fashioned real estate company. And so they go, you've made property into a tech company. This is the greatest thing ever. So why do you think Adam had such a vested interest in making we work out to be a tech company, as opposed to what it actually was, which seems to be just plain real estate? It's all about the value of the company. Technology companies sell for much bigger, multiple is the word they use of what they earn than regular companies. And this is what every company wants to try and be seen as a bit of a tech company, because they think they'll be valued more. And so as you rightly say, this is just office space. Right. In a technology company, once you do the first program, if you're Microsoft and you've invented Excel or something, you can make a million more of those and it costs you nothing. They just get downloaded. If you're Facebook, you've got two billion users. There's very little tangible capital involved in that. It's basically in the ether. But a real estate company, these are just office blocks. And there's only so many offices you can build. There's only so much space. There's only so much concrete. There's only so many can build. And there's only so much room you can rent. Whereas in the internet, there is unlimited amount of space. And that's why they come on these multiples. And why everyone wants to try and pretend to be a tech company, which is what they did. And I think this is also why Adam starts hiring engineers and trying to build this thing called We Connect, which is meant to be a tech platform connecting the different offices to each other. And it's meant to be a kind of internal working app, sort of like what slack is. But crucially, it just doesn't work. And I think one of the engineers at the time said, it didn't matter if it didn't work. They just had to make it because Adam said so. And this is the way of the word community, which we've already mentioned was a big thing in both of their backgrounds when they were growing up. It's the power of the community. That's one of the things that give things like meta Facebook, Google, etc. That gives them their clout. It's the fact that they can convene billions of people at once. And he was basically trying to fake that within what is essentially just serviced offices. And famously, he also pitched to Sean Parker, who invested in Facebook and founded Napster. With the words, I'm doing the social network but the physical social network. And at this point in technology and investing, everyone was promising we're going to change the world, we're going to change how we live. No amount of ambition was too much. Right. And also, everyone wanted to capture the next Google, the next Facebook, whatever. There was a fear of missing out saying, this could be mega. And if we don't get in now, we'll miss the boat. And that was part of the confidence trick as well. He deliberately tried to compare himself to Steve Jobs of Apple. He said that the naughties were the eye, you know, eye-pod, iPhone, eye this, eye that. He said the 2010s are going to be the Wii. And then he went even further that said, I am the Wii. So there you go. I mean, that's where the serial killer music starts happening. That's when everyone should have gotten out. So in this period from 2014 onwards, there's a feeding frenzy. People all want a piece of this. And then comes the big moment when. A guy called Masayoshi-san, a Japanese investor, has the world's biggest investment fund, it's something called the Vision Fund, and he comes in and pumps in billions at a valuation which values this company at $47 billion. They've made the big time. And let's contextualize that figure. How big is $47 billion compared to other tech firms that were getting silly amounts of money at the time? Did it put real work as one of the highest valued companies out there in the world? It put it right at the top of the tree in terms of companies that were still private. Obviously you had the Googles, the apples, what have you, which have been a long time public companies which the public could buy shares in. But this puts it right up there in the galaxy of stars of mega companies that are still private. It's really near the top of the tree. And this is when Adam also becomes a billionaire, right? And starts spending like a billionaire. So I think one of the best stories of Adam's spending spree involves spending $35 million. Yeah, sure change first, small change for a billionaire to buy four apartments in New York to knock them all together into one massive penthouse. He flies 2,000 employees. That's everyone in WeWork to California, rents out Universal Studios Hollywood for the night and pays the chain smokers to perform. And his ego and the disconnect starts growing. So I think at one point during a public relations call with some employees, he starts thinking about, no, maybe I could be president of the United States before then he's informed that unfortunately as someone who is not born in America, he cannot. And then he goes, okay, yeah, well, that's a bit small for me anyway. And he buys, you know, the ultimate corporate play thing is the Gulf Stream jet, a $60 million jet to get around the world. He actually now admits looking back that the $47 billion valuation, that's when he won a bit nuts. I think he went to his head. I mean, he was always wanted to get there, but at that point he thought he was totally invincible. There's a really good story from this period of when Adam's relentless partying starts getting on the nerve of his tenants. So famously, at one point, the Guardian was actually the biggest tenant of WeWork in New York in one of its so-called offices. And he keeps throwing parties in the canteen where people are doing shots. He's like blasting music. And someone from the Guardian comes down and says, "Hi, Adam, do you mind turning it down a little bit?" You know, we've heard Runness Tan for the 10th time in a row. And he locks eyes with her and then silently puts his hand on the volume doubt, turns it all the way up and then starts pretending to stack cash on top of his hands, one hand on top of another. As if to say, "I'm a billionaire, baby. Don't tell me what to do." Wow, what pleasant behaviour. I know exactly what you want from your landlord. Yeah. And the funny thing is about this cash burn thing. During this period, there was a great premium put on companies spending as much money as they could. If you weren't burning through investor cash, like, you know, saying, "We're investing more, we're building, we're building, we're building, we're getting bigger and bigger and bigger." Then people said, "You're not really doing anything at all." So the more money you spent, the more investors would say, "My money's being put to work building the mega company of the future." And those very little focus on, "Are you actually making any profit?" And basically towards the end of the 2010s, the pendulum starts to swing and saying, "Hang on a second, we're spending a lot of money. Are we ever going to make any of this back?" "Where's the profit?" And profitability becomes more of a focus for investors. And this is the point at which people start kicking their tires a little bit and wondering whether Adam Newman is a bit of a wizard of ours, you know? And what's really behind this curtain? And that comes to a real head when they try and become a public company. Now this is when you sell shares to the general public. So rather than just being a billionaire or a JP Morgan or Masayoshi Son, you or me could go and call up our stock broker and say, "I'd like to buy some shares and we work." This is the first time that happens. And before you can do that, you have to file a document, a prospectus, which is like, "Here are the risks, here are the financials." Here's what we're all about. Here's what we're all about. Exactly. You have a read of this. And it's at that point that that document in some ways opens a pandora's box of trouble. So why did we work have to go public in the first place? I mean, couldn't it just have stayed private this entire time and Adam keeps partying, getting stone on his Gulf Street? Yeah. Why do they feel the need to go public? Well, because there's a couple of things. Sometimes the people who back you will have some pressure saying, "Actually, when the company goes public, that's when you cash in." Right. So the investors who've backed him will say, "I think it's time to go public, guys, because actually what that means is when the public buy those shares, they get their money. The investors get that money, and they can then move on and invest in something else." That's the next thing we work. So it's a big payday for the investors, including for the founders themselves. And also, the other thing is the idea that you go public, because it's easier to sell shares to the general public than it is to try and find individual investors. So what you've got is more liquidity, they call it. This is a way, an easy way of raising additional money. You've got in a way the shares in your company become a new currency, and you can print your own. You can basically go out and issue more shares. Right. In the long term, most big companies will go public. And hopefully it means a huge payday for everyone at the company with shares. A massive payday for everyone at the company. It's one of those moments that in every company's life, where when they ring that bell on the New York Stock Exchange, there's a lot of smiling going on, a lot of high-fiving going on. You've made it to the promised land. But there wasn't a lot of smiling or high-fiving when the S1 was released, was there? There was not, because this S1 is basically a brochure for the public to say, do I want to buy shares in this company? And this was a pretty unusual one, because here, the hand of Rebecca Newman comes back into the story. She famously doesn't want it to just be a boring old S1 corporate document. Which they all are. Which they all are for good reason. She hires professional fashion photographers to get involved. You know, she starts thinking about it like it's almost a September issue of VO. You know, there's glossy photos spreads. Stephen Klein, who's shot VO covers at one point, is involved. So really, it's not a very traditional S1. This is when the fairy tale meets the reality of Wall Street. And you said Wizard of Oz. So this is the moment where the curtain gets pulled back and it's Adam Newman. With his long hair and no shoes on. And also with some dodgy statistics backing up the company. He did something called funny metrics. Now most people measure income in a normal way. They call it earnings and then they take off interest and tax and a few other things. He came up with a whole new way of expressing, called something called community adjusted earnings. And everyone said, what the hell is that? What is? Well, what it is, one of the common ways you measure earnings is you have that, the income you have and you subtract interest off that, the interest on your debt. You subtract the taxes you pay, the wear and tear on your buildings and your equipment. But he was also adding back things like marketing expenses, development, design costs, intangible stuff, coolness, whatever. So he called it community adjusted earnings. And most of the Wall Street guards, I've never heard of this in my entire life. What is he smoking? Well, we know what he's saying. We know what he's saying. Well, a lot of weed. A lot of weed. And so that's when the music stops. And from going from $47 billion as it last valuation as a private company, it plummets by $40 billion to just $7 billion. So you have seen $40 billion go up in smoke in the blink of an eye. And the question that I have just as a normal person reading about this story is why didn't this happen sooner? Why didn't any of the Wall Street guys look at Adam spending how much we wasn't making? Look at how many offices were going up and asked themselves, okay, well, where's the profit? Where's our money being spent? Why aren't we seeing a return on our investment? He is the epitome of the messianic. Even looks, what the hair is. What's the hair stuff? Feet in the long hair. I mean, there was one other long hair, barefoot man who came from Israel. He did quite well for himself. Well, exactly, but he's almost the poster child for that. The sky's the limit. I'm going to colonize Mars. I'm going to change the way the world works. You've got people like Elon Musk trying to make the place an interplanetary species. There is something captivating and hypnotic and mesmerizing about people who dare to dream that big. And something quite infectious about it, if you're a certain type of person. And it was in a culture and a time where that kind of thing was celebrated, everyone wanted on board. And there was a fear of missing out. FOMO was a big thing, so people didn't want to do that. I mean, just listening to you. You don't know like you don't agree. You're a communist. Surely, you know, J.P. Morgan, the smartest guys on Wall Street, would have met Adam Neumann and said, "Okay, well, you seem very convincing." And we are obviously motivated by a fear of missing out on the next Google. But show us the numbers. Can't you share with us some financial documents? How much do diligence do people perform before throwing this much money at we work? Well, there were some noises in around 2015 when people started saying Buzzfeed had a good story about the fact that their valuations, their financial performance was not all that it looked like. But you're right. Rationally, you look back on this and say, "How the hell did this happen?" This was also right after a point where Adam started getting slated in the press, right? So there were multiple articles talking about Adam's, you know, eccentric, [BLANK_AUDIO] unconventional behaviour. There was a story in the Wall Street Journal talking about Adams, quite relaxed attitude around drugs, getting stone in the Gulf Stream, people finding a cereal box full of weed on the plane that he'd left behind. And then the famous story about Adam spearheading the layoffs of 7% of his company and then handing out tequila shots and getting run DMC to play in the office. I mean, all of that starts building the image of Adam as being chronically unsuited to rehabilitating anything, let alone we work. The picture you're painting there is one of someone who's getting increasingly detached from the reality of what's going on in the business is living in entirely separate life. And the cracks start beginning to show and the financials weren't adding up. So all of these things came together and there's a famous meeting where probably the most famous Wall Street bank has still walking. The only survivor from the great financial crisis is a guy called Jamie Diamond who is the chief executive chairman of JP Morgan Chase. Right. Still is. So this smartest guy at this smartest guy in the room? Yeah, and a real maverick and a real veteran. And he's the one who comes along to Adam and says, Adam, it's time for you to go. Your track record, your personality, is not suited to what is now a kind of rehabilitation job. Your particular kind of charm is not what we need now. So the fairy tale is effectively now over. He's lost a huge amount of his own net worth. He's been tapped on the shoulder by a king of Wall Street to say it's over buddy. But it's not quite over because let's look at where we are right now. Let's bring this story right up to date. Well, Adam is still fabulously wealthy. In fact, Softbank, which remember his master's company, was given control of we workers, they invested so much of masses money into it. And as part of a bailout plan, they promised Adam $1.7 billion, which is not to be sniffed at considering he pretty much almost drove the company into the ground. And that made a lot of people angry because there would have been investors who lost everything. People who invested when the valuation was right up at $47 billion, they've seen their investments plummet. And more importantly, hundreds thousands of people lost their jobs and they walked away with nothing. They were believers in the adenumon myth and they ended up with nothing whereas he walks away with over a billion dollars. And he actually has now invested in US real estate, which to me suggests someone who isn't exactly repentant about what he did, does it? Yeah, well, it's interesting. A good old fashion real estate, the kind of thing that he tried to make money on the first place, doing it in more traditional way now. He's also got a bunch of investments in little startup companies. He's been big into crypto. Of course. Crypto, the favorite investment of the mold-breaking, disruptive mindset. So he still feels like he's a bit of a maverick investor out there and he's launched something called Flow, which is reinventing apartment living. And he's got the venture capitalist back, backing him again. There's a guy called Andrieson Horror Whits, a company called Mark Andrieson, famous tech investor. He's given him $350 million, so he's still got some of that old charm. I just don't get it. I mean, if you lost so many investors, so much money, drove a company into the ground, why would anybody take another bet on you? Because in Silicon Valley terms, and in modern venture capital investing, sometimes having been through, been at the front line, having had the scars of failure is seen as an asset. And in fact, even Newman himself said, "It took me five businesses to get to we work." He's made money once. He can make it again. I doubt whether people ever throw as much money at him again as they did there. You'd help. So how do we in the top trumps of our billionaires, for those people who know that, we've got lots of categories we'll try and rank him on. So on wealth, how rich was he and how did he wear his wealth? Well, he certainly wore his wealth with great penache arrogance. Yes, I mean, the private jet, the buffontish hair, the kind of flamboyant style. Yeah, he enjoyed being rich a lot. Even though, as we sit here today, in sheer wealth terms, he only scrapes onto the list of billionaires. Even as peak, he was nowhere near the wealth level of someone like Bezos. Yeah, or Mask or whatever. But he definitely wanted to be in that category and he definitely lived it large. He behaved like one of those new titans of tech. I would give him an eight-for-style, but a two-for-substance. He's kind of a bit of a titler. Oh, I'm sure Adam would love to be described as a titler. I feel like an eight-for-style and maybe even just a one-for-actual substance. He's barely making the great deal. He's barely scraping the list. Okay. What about rags to riches, then? So, you know, from that dusty kibbutz in Israel or the way to the height of being one of the richest men in New York, you know, how far do you think he's come from his roots? Well, he definitely bought a return ticket because he went all that way and then kind of crashing down again. So I think, you know, listen, he didn't, it's not a rags to riches story. It was never rags. He had family money. So I'm going to give that a four. I would actually put it down to maybe even a two because while Elon Musk, I'm sure, enjoyed his briefling with a Hollywood actress. It's nowhere near as good as being related to Gwyneth Paltrow. Let's put it that way. Okay, fair enough. What about villainy, then? Lots of people who invested in WeWork lost all their money and he walked away with over a billion dollars. So that's pretty rubbish. He also had some pretty questionable ethical behavior towards WeWork employees. There was lots of stories of making them work through the night, a lot of employees lost their job, as you say, even when they were being sacked, he was having a party. There was a sexual assault allegation laid against WeWork, not against Adam, but against other employees where one woman said that she was sexually assaulted at company events and that the company, led by Adam, did everything in its power to retaliate against her and even fired her and that the employees who allegedly assaulted her were still at the company. So to me, that indicates someone whose morality is murky at best and talks about culture at the company itself. And she said that the assaults reflected a company culture where drinking was heavily encouraged and this kind of informal atmosphere where anything goes a frat boy mentality was coming from the very top, i.e. Adam. Yeah, and that would kind of chime with those tales we get from Silicon Valley about tech bros, quite a massagingistic outlook in some companies and that's something that Silicon Valley culturally has had to grapple with and whether it had success or not is a matter of a debate. But at the same time he's not dealing in arms or drugs, right? So, you know, we'll get to our arms dealers later in this series. But, I'm going to give him something, I find something quite off-putting about his behavior. Arrogant, Bracodosio, tried to be a prophet, turned out to be a pretty empty one. I don't like this guy, I'll be honest with you. So I'm going to give him six or seven on Villani. He sort of reminds me of that character played by Port Dana and there will be blood. You know, that kind of egotistical preacher who's convinced he's spearheading a spiritual revolution. He doesn't do necessarily anything that terrible in the film, but there's something about him where you feel, oh, this guy gives me the "ick". He gives me the "ick" is what I'm trying to say. Because he's greedy as well. Greedy and arrogant. So yeah, I agree with that. I would give him a six. A six for the "ick". So what about philanthropy? You know, did he ever try and redeem himself with great acts of charity? Well, one question he was asked, given the fact he walked away with $1.7 billion or an employee's went with nothing. He was asked, why don't you just give them some of your money? And he said, I don't like to talk publicly about these things. I just like to do things in private. So private, no one seems to know anything about them. So there we go. I'll be honest. I don't know whether he's donated a wing to a hospital or whatever, but he doesn't strike me as one of the great philanthropes. No, and he definitely hasn't talked about any of it. Now, I actually think that around the time of Trump and employee actually asked him, are we doing anything as a company to help refugees and migrants? And he says, when we work achieves its maximum potential, the refugees will come to us and will be able to help them. As if to imply that at some point we work would be in the business of building houses for refugees. So I don't really think his philanthropy had anything to do with wanting to help people. He just wanted to make we work as big as possible. Okay. What about when it comes to power? So clearly, he's got a powerful charm about him, right? To get the much money out of people who should really know better. That is almost the key power you need in places like Silicon Valley when you're raising money. That is the super power, which is to get people to believe in your incredibly ambitious claims. And he managed to get some of the richest and smartest investors in the world to buy into that. So if, you know, if the gift of the gab and influencing people is a power, then he scores pretty highly on that one. I would give him probably an eight for that. I mean, it turns out that as off-putting as some of us find that kind of messianic self-belief, some people are just attracted to it. Yeah, but, you know, he's a much diminished figure now. He was never in a position where he could pick up the phone to the present United States, can't start a war, didn't leave an Amazon behind. So I think it turned out to be quite an empty power. I guess yeah, in terms of real world power, Probably about a full now. Um, I'm gonna give him a fff. - Five. - In terms of legacy though, I would say he actually scores quite low on this, because people have basically looked at, you know, the co-working model, which, you know, he never really pioneered or trailblazed himself. He just did very well for a period of time. And they kind of look at it now and go, what were you thinking this idea that everyone's gonna live and die in the workplace now that people are working from home? - Yeah, obviously, COVID hit this hybrid communal working thing like a freight train and destroyed it almost. There are doubts about whether it will even survive as a go-and-concern. So I have to say that on legacy, he scores low on the legacy of his own company. How people approach and the conversations you have with your employer about where and how you work. I think there was, you know, that we were did move that conversation along a little bit, but not to the extent that COVID did. So I would, on legacy, I would give him a three. I would give him less than that, actually, because nowadays I feel like especially we talk to younger millennials, Gen Z, this entire idea of the workplace being where you live your life and make your friends and find your community. They kind of heaps gone on that. They're very cynical about that idea that your work is your friend. And that is basically what Adam Newman based we work on. So in terms of legacy, I would actually give him a one. - Final judgment, I've already made it clear. I don't like this guy. (laughs) I just don't like it. - He won't stop with over a billion dollars. And everyone else who put my name to the company lost pretty much a lot. So I think he was arrogant. I think he was insensitive. In a way, he's kind of like a poster child for the kind of false profit. So I think bad billionaire. - I mean, as I said before, something about him just gives me the egg. And it's undefineable. You can't put your finger on it, but some people just strike you in life. It's one of those people you should run away not to walk. And unfortunately, Adam Newman convinced a lot of people to run toward him. So in my mind, he's a baddie. - Once you've got the egg, you can't go back. Who's up next? - So we're going to be talking about the billionaire who wasn't Chuck Fini. - Who basically everyone thought was as richest creases, but in fact. - Was giving it all away on the download. Thanks for listening to Good Bad billionaire. This podcast is produced by Hannah Hartford and Mark Ward, James Cook is our editor and it's a BBC audio production. (upbeat music) (dramatic music) (dramatic music)