Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Fall of WeWork

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What to expect

The inside story of the rise and fall of WeWork, showing how the excesses of its founder shaped a corporate culture unlike any other

Christened a potential savior of Silicon Valley's startup culture, Adam Neumann was set to take WeWork, his office share company disrupting the commercial real estate market, public, cash out on the company's 47 billion dollar valuation, and break the string of major startups unable to deliver to shareholders. But as employees knew, and investors soon found out, WeWork's capital was built on promises that the company was more than a real estate purveyor, that in fact it was a transformational technology company.

Veteran journalist Reeves Weideman dives deep into WeWork and it CEO's astronomical rise, from the marijuana and tequila-filled board rooms to cult-like company summer camps and consciousness-raising with Anthony Kiedis. Billion Dollar Loser is a character-driven business narrative that captures, through the fascinating psyche of a billionaire founder and his wife and co-founder, the slippery state of global capitalism.

(P) 2020 Hachette Audio

Critics Review

A satisfying ticktock of the company’s rapid rise and crash, culminating in its disastrous I.P.O. in 2019 and Neumann’s ouster. — New York Times

A frisky dissection of how a rickety real-estate leasing company tricked the world into seeing it as an immensely valuable, society-shifting tech unicorn….Wiedeman arranges the absurd details of their high lives in the C-suite into a pointillist portrait of wild hubris. — WIRED

In the distant future, when historians recall the geyser of cash that banks and venture capitalists directed to Silicon Valley, they will almost certainly use the catastrophic collapse of WeWork as a cautionary tale. — Bloomberg

Move over Theranos, there’s a new fallen unicorn in town. Wiedeman deftly takes us inside the much-hyped WeWork and its once venerated founder to find out what really happened-and what really went wrong. — Newsweek

A swift, tragicomic saga of idealism, avarice, and unfettered ambition-as illuminating about WeWork as the past decade of venture-funded grandiosity, and an excellent case study in the power of branding. Reeves Wiedeman has a talent for the artfully deployed, jaw-dropping detail; there seems to be one on every page. Reading this book gave me the sensation of visiting a Potemkin village after a storm: wires dangling, trompe l’oeil flats at a tilt. Batshit, unsettling, and wholly satisfying. — Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley

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