Rebekah Paltrow Neumann

Rebekah Paltrow Neumann is an American actress, filmmaker, and entrepreneur. Born and raised in New York, Rebekah attended The Horace Mann High School and went on to major in Business and Buddhism at Cornell University. Upon graduating, Rebekah was accepted into Solomon Smith Barney's Sales and Trading Program. Soon thereafter, she left to pursue a career in acting and film. Classically trained with Eric Morris and The Old Vic Theatre, Rebekah has starred opposite Rosario Dawson in Awake and appeared opposite Lucy Liu in Nomads. On stage, she most recently starred in an Old Vic production of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters directed by Eve Best. In 2012, Rebekah Paltrow Neumann co-founded WeWork Studios, the independent film production arm of WeWork. Wework, the first physical social network, was co-founded in 2010 by Rebekah's husband, entrepreneur Adam Neumann. Rebekah Vicki Paltrow came into the world ensconced in wealth and bad energy. The baby of the family, her youngest elder sibling, Keith, was 12 years old when she was born in 1978. By the time Rebi was in school, her parents, Bob and Evelyn, were still nominally living together but increasingly estranged. Evelyn’s family had made a killing with an accessories business now known as the lingerie company Gelmart; Bob’s family had made a tidy sum manufacturing steel pipes, and there was North American Communications, the junk mail printer-distributor Bob co-founded with a childhood friend. At some point in the ’80s, the junk mail company began to underperform, and Bob juiced the earnings a bit, founding a faux charity called American Cancer Research Inc. The authorities began sniffing around and, ultimately, sued the charity, the junk mail company, and Bob Paltrow. Washington got involved a few years into the saga, suing the group on behalf of the U.S. Postal Service in 1990. Keith died at 23 years old, after a yearlong struggle with cancer. Moni Liberman was a charming Tel Aviv event promoter who met Rebi’s older sister Marlene on the beach in Malibu and quickly became part of the extended Paltrow family. He worked on the set of St. Elsewhere, which was written by Bob’s brother, Bruce Paltrow, and babysat Bruce’s children, cousins Gwyneth and Jake. Rebi went to the prestigious Bronx private high school Horace Mann where she was best friends with Amanda Tisch, future fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar. When Rebi moved up to Ithaca for college in 1996 at her father’s alma mater, Cornell, her cousin Gwyneth was on the cover of both Vogue and New York magazines. Rebi majored in Buddhism and business, and she interviewed for first-year jobs at investment banks during her senior year of college. She moved into a West Village walk-up and got a job on the trading desk at Smith Barney. Rebi quit Smith Barney weeks into the program. While her older sisters, Marlene and Lisi, landed in The New York Times’ Sunday Styles section for their party-throwing exploits, and Marlene divorced her second husband after the SEC began probing his role in an insider trading scheme, and Gwyneth eloped and had babies, and Bob and Evelyn made their divorce official, Rebi moved to Los Angeles and started taking classes at the Kabbalah Centre. In 2007, as Rebekah tells it, she had just come back to New York City after an intense Jivamukti instructor certification program upstate when she agreed to go on a date with a guy one of her college friends had met on the roof of his building. Adam Neumann had moved to New York from Tel Aviv around the same time Rebekah had taken off for India.Like Rebekah, he had never held down a real job, having spent his 20s in his own kind of tequila-soaked wilderness. Unlike Rebekah, on their first date, he had the nicotine shakes and no money to pay for a cab. At least some members were initially skeptical of Adam — a former member remembers one instructor musing that he would “never amount to anything” — but Rebekah conferred legitimacy upon him. At the group’s headquarters, Adam ended up meeting many of WeWork’s earliest investors: private equity investor Steven Langman, Madonna’s ex Marc Schimmel, and Ashton Kutcher, who parted ways with Kabbalah when he broke up with Demi Moore but stayed friends with Adam. Rebekah spent WeWork’s early days revisiting her acting aspirations.She also helped orchestrate the parties for which WeWork became legendary. Rebekah didn’t start appearing in all the news stories about WeWork until 2014, the year the company achieved its first official billion-dollar valuation, on revenue of more than $100 million. The same year, Bob Paltrow, following a few years of legal wrangling with IRS auditors, pleaded guilty to felony tax evasion over his liberal use of the junk mail company to finance his lifestyle, including a membership at Mar-a-Lago. Bob was sentenced to six months in prison. In the years that followed, the Neumanns similarly commingled their finances with WeWork’s, calling upon the company’s construction department to assemble furniture and install light fixtures in their homes, directing employees to spend three full days downloading kids' movies to the entertainment center of the company's $60 million Gulfstream, and buying assets WeWork would in turn lease back from them. When SoftBank pulled out of a promise to invest another $16 billion at the beginning of 2019, the company doubled down and decided to go public. In preparation for an initial public offering, Rebekah compiled a prospectus that projected the most enlightened, aspirational image possible of a business with the financial reality of a condemned basement. The junk mail company that had bankrolled Rebekah's lavish childhood began to collapse, too, a few months before WeWork's botched IPO. In March 2019, roughly 700 employees of a company factory in Ciudad Juárez were told to take a three-day weekend, only to return to an empty warehouse. The Neumanns intend to come back to New York, according to their Tel Aviv-based publicist Asher Gold, albeit to a slightly humbled existence; they just listed the Gramercy penthouse for $37.5 million.