The Cult Of We: Wework And The Great StartUp Delusion

An amazing portrait of how grifters came to be called visionaries and high finance lost its mind. Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of The Power of HabitThe definitive inside story of WeWork, its audacious founder, and the companys epic unravelling from the journalists who first broke the story wide open.In 2001, Adam Neumann arrived in New York after five years as a conscript in the Israeli navy. Just over fifteen years later, he had transformed himself into the charismatic CEO of a company worth $47 billion. With his long hair and feelgood mantras, the sixfootfive Neumann looked the part of a messianic Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The vision he offered was mesmerizing: a radical reimagining of work space for a new generation. He called it WeWork.As billions of funding dollars poured in, Neumanns ambitions grew limitless. WeWork wasnt just an office space provider; it would build schools, create cities, even colonize Mars. In pursuit of its founders vision, the company spent money faster than it could bring it in. From his private jet, sometimes clouded with marijuana smoke, the CEO scoured the globe for more capital but in late 2019, just weeks before WeWorks highly publicized IPO, everything fell apart. Neumann was ousted from his company, but still was poised to walk away a billionaire.Calling to mind the recent demise of Theranos and the hubris of the dotcom era bust, WeWorks extraordinary rise and staggering implosion were fueled by disparate characters in a financial system blind to its risks. Why did some of the biggest names in banking and venture capital buy the hype? And what does the future hold for Silicon Valley unicorns? Wall Street Journal reporters Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell explore these questions in this definitive, rollicking account of WeWorks boom and bust.