Here's who gets rich if WeWork has a successful IPO

If investors buy into WeWork's ambitious vision when it sells shares to the public in its IPO, a handful of people and investors stand to make a killing.

The IPO paperwork reveals who the company's biggest backers are.

We won't know how much their stakes will be worth until the company reveals more details about its IPO, such the initial share price.

But we still had some fun calculating what these stakes might be worth, based on what shares reportedly previously sold for.

Read all of Business Insider's WeWork coverage here.

WeWork just dropped the paperwork for its IPO.

That means, we now have a chance to take a closer look at the company's finances, including which investors own the largest stakes.

The We Company, as WeWork's corporate parent is known, has many more private investors than its new S-1 filing reveals and some of them have already cashed out and done well. Insiders have sold billions of dollars of We Co. stock in so-called secondary transactions — in which shareholders privately sell their stock directly to investors — according to Pitchbook, the database that tracks such records.

For instance, shareholders sold $1.3 billion to Softbank in August, 2017, in addition to the $1.7 billion Softbank spent on shares issued by the company. In January, Softbank bought another $1 billion of shares from existing shareholders, as well, Pitchbook says.

The company hasn't yet disclosed the price it plans to sell shares. So it's not possible to know (or even guess) how much each person's stake is worth at this time.

Still, in 2017, when WeWork raised $1.7 billion (and had raised $3.4 billion to date) which valued the company at $21 billion, investors bought in at $57.90 per share, according to Pitchbook.

So, just for the sheer fun of it, we calculated the value of all classes of shares at $58.

We'll learn the true value of each stake when the company prices its shares right before they begin to trade, and we'll update this article at that time.