Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

BILLION DOLLAR LOSER

Reeves Wiedeman

The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork

In its earliest days, WeWork promised the impossible: to make the American work place cool. Adam Neumann, an immigrant determined to make his fortune in the United States, landed on the idea of repurposing surplus New York office space for the burgeoning freelance class. Over the course of ten years, WeWork attracted billions of dollars from some of the most sought-after investors in the world, while spending it to build a global real estate empire that he insisted was much more than that: an organization that aspired to nothing less than "elevating the world's consciousness."

Moving between New York real estate, Silicon Valley venture capital, and the very specific force field of spirituality and ambition erected by Adam Neumann himself, Billion Dollar Loser lays bare the internal drama inside WeWork. Based on more than two hundred interviews, this book chronicles the breakneck speed at which WeWork's CEO built and grew his company along with Neumann's relationship to a world of investors, including Masayoshi Son of Softbank, who fueled its chaotic expansion into everything from apartment buildings to elementary schools.

Culminating in a day-by-day account of the five weeks leading up to WeWork's botched IPO and Neumann's dramatic ouster, Wiedeman exposes the story of the company's desperate attempt to secure the funding it needed in the final moments of a decade defined by excess. Billion Dollar Loser is the first book to indelibly capture the highly leveraged, all-blue-sky world of American business in President Trump's first term, and also offers a sober reckoning with its fallout as a new era begins.

Reeves Wiedeman is a contributing editor at New York magazine, and has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Harper's, and other publications.
Available products
Book

Published 2020-10-01 by Little, Brown (US)

Comments

"A thrilling page-turner. ... What lifts this book to excellence is Wiedeman's ease at presenting a complex business saga both understandably and entertainingly. Readers will feel like they are in the room with Neumann and his beleaguered colleagues during every twist and turn of this fascinating corporate train wreck." (starred review) Publishers Weekly also picked BILLION DOLLAR LOSER as one of its Top 10 Business & Economics Books as part of its Fall 2020 preview: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/new-titles/adult-announcements/article/83644-fall-2020-announcements-business-economics.html Read more...

"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. ... Like John Carreyrou's Bad Blood and Mike Isaac's Super Pumped before it, Billion Dollar Loser traces the turmoil at a startup driven by a charismatic, arrogant founder and a business model fueled more by venture capital's whims than common sense. ... While the book would've been worth reading as a dive into the Neumanns' chaotic world alone, it also contextualizes how the pair ended up rising so high despite their near-constant foibles, providing a pocket history of the puffed-up startup marketplace of the 2010s. Wiedeman boils WeWork's complex financial fiasco down to its juiciest parts—for a book so concerned about SEC forms, it is never, ever a slog.” (13 Books You Need to Read This Fall) Read more...

UK: Hodder;

“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.” ("Must-Read Fall Nonfiction") Read more...

"How to Get Rich By Losing Lots of Money" Read more...

“Adam Neumann thought he was the next Steve Jobs. In a vivid, carefully reported drama that readers will gulp down as if it were a fast-paced novel, Reeves Wiedeman follows the charismatic Neumann as he climbs to the mountaintop, then falls off, leaving readers to ponder whether he was a charlatan or a believer, or both, and ponder what this tale teaches about those who blindly followed WeWork up the mountain.” ?Ken Auletta “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