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
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.
In this debut memoir, Bahamian millionaire Bastian offers insight into building a business.
The author was a millionaire by the time he was 19, an impressive feat considering he began his working life filling stockpots and rolling napkins in his father’s Nassau restaurant, a locals’ hole-in-the-wall far from the city’s tourist hotels. “In many ways, I started ten steps behind the starting line in a world where opportunities felt few and far between,” writes Bastian in his introduction. A poor student with a gambler’s risk tolerance and a salesman’s eye for an unserved market, the author dropped out of college to launch his own satellite installation business—the first of its kind in the Bahamas—eventually expanding into prepaid phones and other electronics. With this book, Bastian uses his personal experiences to illustrate the steps aspiring entrepreneurs should consider when building their own empires. “My goal isn’t just to tell my story,” he explains; “it’s to provide you with a starting point, a strategy, and the encouragement you need to take your first step toward something bigger.” The book alternates between memoiristic chapters describing the author’s youth and career and instructional chapters outlining the best practices to “become a lion” (his preferred metaphor for a brave, risk-taking captain of industry). From evaluating one’s skill set and choosing a suitable goal to the practicalities of regulation and taxes, Bastian walks the reader through the complicated processes of starting and maintaining a successful enterprise. While much of the advice is of the boilerplate variety, the author offers it with clarity and candor, devoting an entire chapter, for example, on how to fail productively. It is the biographical material that lends his advice unusual weight—Bastian’s stories of flying back and forth between the Bahamas and Miami to personally import satellite dishes are fascinating enough to stand on their own. Readers may be unable to replicate his success, but there is no denying that his tale is inspiring.
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798891882485
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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