THE CULT OF WE

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.