Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and Wework
Description
A Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller
"Vivid, carefully reported drama that readers will gulp down as if it were a fast-paced novel" (Ken Auletta)
The inside story of WeWork and its CEO, Adam Neumann, which tells the remarkable saga of one of the most audacious, and improbable, rises and falls in American business history
In its earliest days, WeWork promised the impossible: to make the American work place cool. Adam Neumann, an immigrant determined to make his fortune in the United States, landed on the idea of repurposing surplus New York office space for the burgeoning freelance class. Over the course of ten years, WeWork attracted billions of dollars from some of the most sought-after investors in the world, while spending it to build a global real estate empire that he insisted was much more than that: an organization that aspired to nothing less than "elevating the world's consciousness."
Moving between New York real estate, Silicon Valley venture capital, and the very specific force field of spirituality and ambition erected by Adam Neumann himself, Billion Dollar Loser lays bare the internal drama inside WeWork. Based on more than two hundred interviews, this book chronicles the breakneck speed at which WeWork's CEO built and grew his company along with Neumann's relationship to a world of investors, including Masayoshi Son of Softbank, who fueled its chaotic expansion into everything from apartment buildings to elementary schools.
Culminating in a day-by-day account of the five weeks leading up to WeWork's botched IPO and Neumann's dramatic ouster, Wiedeman exposes the story of the company's desperate attempt to secure the funding it needed in the final moments of a decade defined by excess. Billion Dollar Loser is the first book to indelibly capture the highly leveraged, all-blue-sky world of American business in President Trump's first term, and also offers a sober reckoning with its fallout as a new era begins.
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Reviews
"In the distant future, when historians recall the geyser of cash that banks and venture capitalists directed to Silicon Valley, they will almost certainly use the catastrophic collapse of WeWork as a cautionary tale." --Bloomberg
"A swift, tragicomic saga of idealism, avarice, and unfettered ambition--as illuminating about WeWork as the past decade of venture-funded grandiosity, and an excellent case study in the power of branding. Reeves Wiedeman has a talent for the artfully deployed, jaw-dropping detail; there seems to be one on every page. Reading this book gave me the sensation of visiting a Potemkin village after a storm: wires dangling, trompe l'oeil flats at a tilt. Batshit, unsettling, and wholly satisfying."--Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley
"Adam Neumann thought he was the next Steve Jobs. In a vivid, carefully reported drama that readers will gulp down as if it were a fast-paced novel, Reeves Wiedeman follows the charismatic Neumann as he climbs to the mountaintop, then falls off, leaving readers to ponder whether he was a charlatan or a believer, or both, and ponder what this tale teaches about those who blindly followed WeWork up the mountain."--Ken Auletta
"Wiedeman debuts with a thrilling page-turner. . . . What lifts this book to excellence is Wiedeman's ease at presenting a complex business saga both understandably and entertainingly. Readers will feel like they are in the room with Neumann and his beleaguered colleagues during every twist and turn of this fascinating corporate train wreck."--Publishers Weekly, Starred review
"A satisfying ticktock of the company's rapid rise and crash, culminating in its disastrous I.P.O. in 2019 and Neumann's ouster."--New York Times Book Review