A rousing exposé of extreme financial greed and yet another example of modern corporate hubris.
A comprehensive report on the WeWork startup from windfall to downfall.
Wall Street Journal reporters Brown and Farrell recount their long-running media coverage of the melodramatic rise and fall of WeWork, another tech startup with lofty aspirations but dubious motivations and faulty executive leadership. The company debuted in 2010 in New York’s SoHo district as a shared-workspace venture led by charismatic CEO Adam Neumann, an Israeli businessman who got his start selling children’s clothing. The breathless narrative, propelled by diligent reporting, chronicles the startup’s rapid expansion worldwide, eventually becoming the most valuable startup in the country. Excessive spending, private jets, lavish corporate retreats, and outrageous employee perks followed, all buoyed by a “fund-raising conveyor belt” of nonstop investors, including the “second-largest private investment ever made in a U.S. startup,” courtesy of Japanese holding company SoftBank in 2017. The authors then chart WeWork’s inevitable decline once investors began balking at Neumann’s esoteric, obsessive business ventures and his obvious bouts of financial euphoria. Drawing from interviews with former WeWork and SoftBank staff, rivals, friends, and family members, Brown and Farrell vividly piece together the details of how Neumann persuaded backers to invest in his company with minimal oversight while those same venture capitalists also believed WeWork was a remunerative tech firm rather than the perilous real estate company it truly was. In what the authors call a bait-and-switch debacle, tens of billions in company value evaporated in 2019, and the company immediately unraveled. There followed Neumann’s ouster, regulatory investigations, investor lawsuits, and banks running scared and reneging on lending agreements. The book’s coda includes an update on Neumann’s status: “Eager and full of energy,” he is “yearning to get back in the game” and attempting to reattract funders and staff “who hadn’t turned on him.”
A rousing exposé of extreme financial greed and yet another example of modern corporate hubris.Pub Date: July 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-23711-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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