Wall Street reporters, Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell

Extra ordinary rise and precipitous fall of Adam Elliot Neumann

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Wall Street reporters, Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Wall Street reporters, Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell

Wall Street reporters, Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell, probes into the saga of ambition by aspiring entrepreneur to hit big time and the reasons why some of the biggest names in banking and venture capital buy the hype? What does the future hold for Silicon Valley “unicorns”? “The Cult of We” explores these questions with a rollicking account of WeWork’s boom and bust.

The definitive inside story of WeWork, and Adam Neumann, its audacious founder, and the company’s epic unravelling from the journalists who first broke the story.

Adam Neumann,  six-foot-five high, arrived in New York in 2001, after five years as a conscript in the Israeli navy. Fifteen years later, he had transformed himself into the charismatic long-haired CEO of a company worth $47bn.

His vision he offered was mesmerising a radical reimagining of work space for a new generation called WeWork.

Neumann’s ambitions grew exponentially as billions of dollars poured in. WeWork wasn’t just an office space provider, but a cult which would build schools, create cities, even colonise Mars. Neumann wondered from the ice bath, he had installed in his office, become the first trillionaire or a world leader? In pursuit of its founder’s grandiose vision, the company spent money faster than it could bring in. From his private jet, sometimes clouded with marijuana smoke, the CEO scored the globe for more capital, but in late 2019, just weeks before WeWork’s highly publicised IPO, everything fell apart, as Neumann was ousted from his company, but still was poised to walk away a billionaire.

 

The recent demise of Theranos and the hubris of the dotcom era bust, WeWork’s extraordinary rise and staggering implosion were fuelled by disparate characters in a financial system blind to risks, from a Japanese billionaire with designs on becoming the Warren Buffet of tech, to leaders at JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs who seemed intoxicated by a Silicon Valley culture where sensible business models lost out to youthful CEOs who promised disruption.

The Cult of We: WeWork and the Great Start-Up Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell,  Mudlark £20/ Crown $28.