WeWork after WeCrashed: New CEO Santora on how to rebuild a wayward brand

WeWork's near-death experience — a $47bn valuation collapse, founder Adam Neumann's spectacular exit, and a 2023 Chapter 11 bankruptcy — makes its CEO John Santora's task one of the toughest challenges in corporate rehabilitation. The 69-year-old veteran, who spent 47 years at Cushman & Wakefield, rising from maintenance worker to COO, was recruited three days after approaching WeWork's majority shareholder about a routine property partnership. As Emma Jacobs from our partners at the Financial Times shares below, two years in, the results are real: $4bn of debt eliminated, occupancy up from 63% to nearly 80%, membership at 550,000. Operating profit targeted by year-end. The pool table is staying — for now. The frat-boy culture is gone..By Emma Jacobs.The chief executive of WeWork is on the eighth floor in front of huge windows with a view of the rail tracks of Waterloo station. “I’m sitting here, and I’m looking at this pool table,” he says, “which I don’t love . . . It represents the past.”Dressed in a navy blazer and chinos, 69-year-old John Santora wants to eradicate the co-working group’s “negative image”, with memories of frat-boy culture, free beer on tap and reckless spending.“It’s a grown-up company,” he says. “We’re so much more mature today, [with] discipline. It’s a very different company.” Rather than a pool table, he imagines the room furnished with “a really nice conference table . . . some soft seating”.Following a 47-year career at property company Cushman & Wakefield, where he started as a maintenance employee and advanced to senior positions including chief operating officer, Santora sees his role at WeWork as bringing “credibility and discipline . . . that the outside world needed to see”. Two years into the job he is finalising a restructuring following its 2023 Chapter 11 bankruptcy, a process that has meant eliminating $4bn of debt, withdrawing from 170 unprofitable locations and renegotiating 190 leases.Today the company provides office space to 550,000 members, an increase of 20,000 from last year, from start-ups to Amazon, and generated almost $2.3bn sales last year. Santora expects the company to make an operating profit by the end of 2026 while continuing to invest about $80mn in global capital expenditure annually.Things look very different from the company’s early years, so colourful they were dramatised in an Apple TV mini-series, WeCrashed. After launching in 2010, WeWork became synonymous with co-founder Adam Neumann, the hubristic Israeli entrepreneur who built it into a global juggernaut with a $47bn valuation, the kind normally conferred on tech companies. His lofty ambition to “elevate the world’s consciousness”, cash-burning expansion and a partying culture made for a chaotic environment, and in 2019 Neumann was deposed and a flotation shelved.Santora was then an outside observer, watching from senior positions in the real estate establishment. “It was interesting . . . but then you saw it get out of hand.” He met Neumann just once. “He had a brilliant concept, and he was a hell of a salesman. I’ll leave it at that.”Still, he credits WeWork with forging the co-working market. “There were others before, but it raised attention and created a brand. If you ask people about co-working, they’re going to generally use our name. It’s kind of like Kleenex.”Growing up in Staten Island, New York, Santora expected to follow his father and older brother and become a firefighter, but took a summer job with Cushman & Wakefield and stayed. “New York City was going bankrupt, and financially it was in a crisis, they were laying off cops, firemen and essential workers,” he says. “It would be years and years before I could have an opportunity to be in the fire department.” His father “never really fully understood” his career until Santora “was recognised in the industry”. He says he prefers “not to get into politics” when asked for his thoughts on Donald Trump’s career as a property mogul. “I got a business to run.”While chairing the tri-state region at Cushman & Wakefield, he was planning retirement with his wife, a former teacher, when he approached Anant Yardi, a software and property founder who had recently become a majority shareholder in WeWork, to explore property partnerships. Three days later, Yardi called Santora and asked him to run the company. “I talked to my wife, Debbie, and then I talked with the kids, and we all agreed: ‘Let’s give it a shot.’ I still have a lot of gas in the tank.”Santora was lured by the prospect of turning around “a brand name, the chance to make a mark”. Are there plans to go public? “Absolutely not. I don’t know that I would have taken the role as the CEO if the intent was to take it public.” A self-described “operating guy”, he prefers to be with clients and staff. At “a public company, the CEO’s role is as much facing Wall Street and the markets as . . . your people and team. And it separates you too much.”Despite “bumps and bruises”, the transition to WeWork was “surprisingly easy”, he says. “At the end of the day, this is a real estate company.” In a younger workforce, he believes his long-term perspective offers calm. “Every four to seven years, something changes. The trigger is different, but it always does change. In 2001, you had a technology crisis. People start to come back, companies start to grow. And then you have the financial crisis in 2008.”The flexible workspace market has been growing in New York, London and other cities, with companies piling into the sector and traditional landlords expanding such offerings. Some worry about oversupply and the fortunes of small and medium-sized companies that comprise some of the client base.“We have 47 of the Fortune 100 sitting in our spaces around the world, and as they enter a new market, a lot of times they use us as the first entry point, grow with us and then maybe take a long-term lease, so we see lots of them in cities like London and New York and San Francisco instead of committing [to] the long-term leases.”WeWork’s flexibility offers clients a “relief valve”, allowing them to “step away” without a financial hit “when they’re unsure of how many people they need in a market . . . or whether or not their business is going to grow or shrink because of AI or any other reason”. It proved advantageous as remote work spread after the pandemic, as WeWork offered “engaging” environments that gave staff “a reason to come to work”, Santora adds. “When the CEO or COO says, ‘OK, everybody back’ . . . they didn’t have the space available. We could provide it very quickly and then give them the ability to grow.”To mitigate the risks of WeWork’s long-term leasing, it has introduced different models such as management agreements or revenue sharing with landlords separate from its main portfolio.Despite AI threats to staffing, he believes “long-term, the workforce is going to be OK”. “We’re still in the fear stage right now. Companies will tend to underhire in the beginning and overcalculate what AI will do for their firms, but as you come out of it, firms will be more profitable, which means they’ll grow, which means they’re going to need more employees.” Currently, 220 AI firms are leasing WeWork spaces. “Some of them will become part of a bigger [office], some of them will go away.”The bulk of the restructure was done when Santora arrived, but he still had to take on some of the thornier negotiations across WeWork’s global portfolio. “Are there a handful [of spaces] we would change out if we could? Yeah, but we’re in a really good place.” Global occupancy levels, he says, are just under 80 per cent, “which is incredible . . . When I walked in the door, we were at 63 or 64 percent.” .Read more:.Use this moment to cut debt and invest smarter.A central challenge in the depths of the restructure, he says, was to “get past” the common situation in which “you have an accountant on this shoulder and an attorney on this [one]” and “taking any risk is impossible”. To make the company more responsive to local markets, he appointed regional directors responsible for operations and sales.With his back to the pool table, Santora dismisses my suggestion that by growing up, his company is becoming the same as other office rental companies. “Our community team sets us apart. People feel welcomed, engaged. [On] Halloween they’re doing pumpkins,” he says. Competition from high-end developers vindicates the importance of flexible space, he says.It also underlines the need for white-collar workers to leave their homes. “If you go back to ancient times, people came to cities; people will always be in cities.”.© 2026 The Financial Times Ltd..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

WeWork after WeCrashed: New CEO Santora on how to rebuild a wayward brand

Related Stories

By the numbers: Eskom's performance under Cyril's presidency

The executive blind spot: Why CEOs still misjudge public's backlash against them

Pick n Pay CEO Sean Summers: We had to burn billions to save the company

Google is pushing AI across everything, but risks doing too much too fast: Dave Lee