WeWork’s rise and fall captured brilliantly in The Cult of We, a tale of how dumb ‘smart money’ can be
- Adam Neumann sold his co-working space start-up as a tech firm and a disrupter, but it was neither, write Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
- In a tale that’s smoothly told and with the pace of a John Grisham legal thriller, they bring to life a big cast of characters and make financial arcana simple
The Cult of We – WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell, pub. Random House
This is a story about unicorns. Not the pointy-foreheaded horses of myth, but present-day companies valued at a billion dollars despite producing little in the way of profit. Or even despite continuous vast losses, as in the case of office subleasing company WeWork – a unicorn that turned out to be a donkey with delusions of grandeur.
The Wall Street Journal’s Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell watched WeWork’s rapid rise to a valuation in the tens of billions of dollars, writing frequently about the company and its charismatic Israeli co-founder, Adam Neumann.
Yet the pair’s The Cult of We is no hasty assemblage of previously published material, but a smoothly told account that manages to bring to life a vast cast of characters and to make financial arcana simple to understand, while at the same time maintaining the pace of a John Grisham legal thriller.
It deserves to be transformed into a film – a cross between The Social Network (2010) and The Big Short (2015).