This is Planet Money from NPR.

How many cities are you in?

75 cities, 25 countries, 45 different languages, 250,000 members, and counting.

This is Adam Newman, the founder of WeWork.

He's speaking here in January of last year at a conference of mayors.

At the time, WeWork was worth more than $20 billion.

An extraordinary amount of money for an eight-year-old company that had never made a profit

and was in the business of renting out office space by the month.

But Newman never really talked about WeWork as a company that rented out office space.

Here's what he told the mayors.

If you bring us in for 10 locations, we will create 200,000 jobs over the next 10 years.

And it can go bigger and bigger.

And we want to just bring your jobs.

We'll bring a place to live.

We'll bring education.

And this is important.

We'll bring corporate America.

We will redesign our space, build it, deploy our technology, which is called WeOS, and took

a long time to create, and then put our community message.

Will you do that for a city hall?

I would love to do it for a city hall.

This is the way Newman talked about WeWork and WeWork talked about itself.

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