Wavegarden sells “large stake” to Israeli billionaire!

WeWork tosses its keys into the wavepool bowl!

Let me ask you something. If you were a phenomenally rich surfer, a billionaire, say, and wave pools were starting to be a thing and you could buy any of ’em you wanted, where would you park your cash?

Surf Ranch?

It ain’t even a question.

I’d send my driver up to Lemoore in my Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud II, tell him to kick down the cedar gates, piss in the jacuzzi, toss the WSL a cheque, tell Raimana to stoke up the ski, kick the engine of that train over and get the foil moving and be done with it.

But, as revealed by the Wall Street Journal a few days ago, the company part-owned by the Israeli-born billionaire, and surfer, Adam Neumann, which is called WeWork and makes its cash by renting office space, gussying it all up and sub-letting it, bought a “large stake” in Wavegarden last year.

Wavegarden.

The brave little pool that showed the world it was possible to create an artificial wave that didn’t suck. But had to watch as an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, Adam Fincham, and the greatest-surfer-ever, Kelly Slater, combined to build Surf Ranch.

This?

Or this?

Twice as good? Ten times?

How hard it is to judge such a thing.

As Matt Warshaw posited at the time of the Surf Ranch’s reveal, “The bit at the end of the vid where Kelly parks in the tube, all I could think of was, I’ve never seen anything like that except maybe Barra. And Barra is hot and sticky and crowded, and where’s my passport, and where do you stay, and who’s renting the car, while this wave . . . fuck! I don’t know. Do I want to surf it? I don’t know. Yes. Yes, of course I want to surf it.”

Now, the question here, of course, is whether Neumann bought the tank because of its commercial viability or because he got into the game too early?

And the Webber pool!

Surely, he’s heard of the mythical tank fermenting somewhere in Queensland.