Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork | Reeves Wiedeman

**The Sunday Times Best Business Book of the Year 2020**

'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

'This absorbing book exposes the sheer madness of WeWork: not just its founder Adam Neumann's extreme hubris, but why so many wiser minds bought into the fairytale.' Sunday Times

The inside story of the rise and fall of WeWork, showing how the excesses of its founder shaped a corporate culture unlike any other.
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In its earliest days, WeWork promised the impossible: to make the workplace 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.

Based on more than two hundred interviews, Billion Dollar Loser chronicles the breakneck speed at which WeWork's CEO built and grew his company. Culminating in a day-by-day account of the five weeks leading up to WeWork's botched IPO and Neumann's dramatic ouster, Reeves 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.

With incredible access and piercing insight into the company, Billion Dollar Loser tells the full, inside story of WeWork and its CEO Adam Neumann who together came to represent the most audacious, and improbable, rise and fall in business.
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A Sunday Times Best Business Book of the Year
Fortune Best Book of the Year
New York Times' Books to Watch For in October
WIRED Books to Read This Fall
Bloomberg's Nonfiction Title to Know this Fall
Newsweek's Must Read Fall Nonfiction
Publishers Weekly Top Ten for Business & Economics
InsideHook's Best Books for October

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.

'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.' WIRED

Editorial Reviews

Review

New York Times’ Editors' Choice
Wired’s Books to Read This Fall
Bloomberg’s Nonfiction Title to Know this Fall
Newsweek’s Must Read Fall Nonfiction
Publishers Weekly Top Ten for Business & Economics
InsideHook's Best Books for October 

“Billion Dollar Loser would be absorbing enough if it were just one man’s grandiosity, but Wiedeman has a larger argument to make about what Neumann represents.”―Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

“Wiedeman’s finest feat of reporting and double portraiture is his evocation of Neumann’s relationship with his financial savior (for a time) Masayoshi Son. . . to delve any further into their relationship would be to give away the plot of “Billion Dollar Loser,” which, like the most engrossing nonfiction stories, has a plot indeed, one that only reality could contrive.” 
 ―New York Times Book Review, Editors Choice

"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

"When life transcends art, tell it straight. That’s what Reeves Wiedeman, a New York contributing editor since 2016, has done with Billion Dollar Loser, the propulsive tale of WeWork’s, and Neumann’s, rise and fall."―The Atlantic

“A rollicking Hyperloop of a ride.”―San Francisco Chronicle

"An impressively reported and fast-moving tale of Neumann and WeWork's co-working house of cards...Wiedeman does a wonderful job uncovering the strange, surreal details that reveal what it was like to be in Neumann's orbit."―Pitchbook

"Wiedeman debuts with 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.”―Publishers Weekly, Starred review

“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

“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

“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

“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 --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

About the Author

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.