It’s December of a long hard year. So let’s close it out with a juicy page turner. This debut book from Reeves Wiedeman perfectly captures the tale of WeWork and it’s founder Adam Neumann- a story we have all heard snippets of but has never been accounted for in such depth and with such detail. 

I read this in 2 days and it has since become my entire personality. I can’t have a conversation without mentioning it.  Why, sweetie? Well because the story is so outrageous and improbable you can barely believe it’s fiction. There was so much HYPOCRISY between what Adam Neumann professed for WeWork and actually how he lived his life. Reeves captures his essence so well and the narrative arc is just… *chef’s kiss* 

Do yourself a favor and read this one.

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A Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller 

“Vivid, carefully reported drama that readers will gulp down as if it were a fast-paced novel” (Ken Auletta) 

The inside story of WeWork and its CEO, Adam Neumann, which tells the remarkable saga of one of the most audacious, and improbable, rises and falls in American business history
  
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.

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December 2020