I might have picked this one up at exactly the right time: a few days before I started it, a court released the transcript of Elon Musk's chats with his advisors and friends, which were universally derided for their sycophantic tone and general lack of thoughtful content. The parallels between Musk and the story described in "The Cult of We" are pretty plain to see. Both stories -- one of which is, at the time of this writing, still ongoing -- involve unbridled egos, corporate greed thinly masked by social messaging, and simply stupid amounts of money being thrown around, often to little purpose. As for the story itself? It's both satisfying to know that a lot of people who should have known better lost a lot of money by investing in WeWork, even if it's galling to remember how much money Adam Neumann got out of the company before the party stopped and he was finally forced out. I knew basic facts about WeWork's before its rise and fall, so I spent a lot of time waiting for the company's arc to suddenly nosedive and for its fortunes to change dramatically. Brown and Farrell's prose is no more than workmanlike -- I've read plenty of journalists with better prose styling -- but he handles his story's dynamic fairly well.

There is a certain amount of weirdness to be had here, for readers -- like myself -- who like to ogle at these kinds of car wrecks. Neumann's ego was indeed titanic and far outstripped both his abilities and any future that a company like WeWork could reasonably expect to achieve. It's his wife, Rebekah, one of Gwyneth Paltrow's cousins, who provides a lot of the color here. Her ridiculous new age education initiatives and the touchy-feely, pseud-hippie tone she added to the company's internal documents and ad copy come off as incredibly naive, unintentionally sanctimonious, and unbearably smug. Still, despite all the tequila shots, joints, and performances by indie bands, Neumann himself doesn't seem all that different from the average tech bro. He seems to have hit upon the right concept -- a "physical Facebook" -- at the right time, which is to say, right about when smart phones and social networks became nigh-indispensable features of daily modern life and people discovered how alienating technology could be. He also, it hardly needs to be said, got a lot more money to spend from the investors who bought into his bogus vision.

Brown and Farrell seem to have talked to many of the major players involved in the WeWork story, and their depictions of the major players they couldn't interview seem remarkably complete and well-rounded. They're also good at explaining the process of how companies like WeWork are funded to readers -- again, like myself -- who know little about the world of high-stakes venture capitalist financing. It's sort of shocking, then, to see how much money Neumann could raise using nothing more than an attractive vision and his considerable charisma. For a long time, he moved in an atmosphere where billions in financing were traded as easily as poker chips. But they also ably demonstrate how incredibly wasteful this aspect of modern-day capitalism can be: for every winner that Softbank's Masayoshi Son picked, there were dozens of losers; the entire process seems enormously random and inefficient. Needless to say, prince Mohammed Bin Salman barely misses the billions he threw into Son's "Vision Fund," almost all of which went up in smoke. This, combined with Musk's fatuous text messages, should give anyone convinced of capitalism's ultimate efficiency real pause. While VCs have, of course, funded profitable companies that have improved many of our lives -- or at the very least made them more convenient -- one wonders if those proverbial monkeys and dartboards wouldn't have produced better results.

After finishing "The Cult of We" I sort of wondered if the authors hadn't gotten the title wrong. I wondered whether Adam Neumann, who at one point aspired to bring peace to the Middle East and solve the problem of world hunger, which is a far cry from subletting office space, was really a cult leader or simply a leader in search of a cult. He seemed to work well one-on-one with investors, but I got little sense that most of his rank-and-file employees or the public at large really bought into the story he was telling. A lot of the perks and luxuries he collected while building up WeWork seem, in the last analysis, like the rather ordinary extras enjoyed by the super-rich of the early twenty-first centuries. Cold-water jacuzzis, a personal surf instructor, a private jet, a personal chef, and private schools for the kids? Well, sure. What else would you expect? These details are interesting -- and sometimes telling -- but perhaps not scintillating. Neuman himself hardly comes off well: he's depicted as mercurial, prone to fits of anger, and unstoppably greedy. But In terms of pure weirdness and malevolence, he seems a much smaller figure, all things considered, than, say, L. Ron Hubbard or a certain former US president I could name, and this makes "The Cult of We" less fun to read than it could have been. Whatever his sins might have been -- and he committed many -- it's hard not to see him as a product of his time. Neumann might be described as a wannabe Elon, or a could-have-been Kanye: a guy who desperately wanted to become another towering, irritatingly inescapable presence in modern life. It's probably best that he really only achieved this status among his potential investors, all of whom seem to have forgotten to check the color of WeWork's bottom line. Unfortunately, so much of this story seems predictable these days. Where this book really shines is when it illustrates the financial system that made all of this possible for a guy who struggled to define what business he was actually in, never mind when and how it was going to make a profit. And maybe that's something that should keep us all up at night. ( )

My introduction to co-working spaces was through the Impact Hub network in Boulder and the Bay Area, circa 2012. It wasn't until 2017, when organizing a film screening for Slow Food Nations in Denver, that I had my first interaction with a WeWork. My understanding at the time was that WeWork was the Starbucks of co-working spaces—commodified, slick, but lacking in true community and certainly not place-sourced. My only other time in WeWork was at an Oakland location in March of 2020, right at the onset of COVID in the US. At that point, it was pretty empty. I remember a hall of stall-like conference rooms—functional, but not at all pleasant.

This book tells the story of Adam Neumann, the founder and former CEO of WeWork. The main bent of the author's narrative is a criticism of the ways that Neumann profited from WeWork, even though the company is now worth a fraction of its all-time high, and other team members/employees gains from the experience pale by comparison to Neumann. The author's navigate this critique through a method of character assassination.

I picked up the book when it was announced that Neumann was entering the blockchain carbon credit space (a space that I am also in). But by the time I had finished the book, a statement went out that Neumann wasn't actually involved in the project (FlowCarbon).

The book has me considering paradigms and cultural judgement. Like many authors documenting Silicon Valley, they take a tact of character assassination. Obviously, Neumann completed some pretty sketchy business deals—for example, in being on both sides of a number of real estate transactions involving WeWork. That said, I wouldn't go as far as to condemn all of Neumann's practices. For example, Neumann's fondness of saunas and cold plunges is brought up many times in the text as a way to ostracize and discredit him. But just because saunas and cold plunges aren't commonplace in the United States, doesn't make their users deranged. I was introduced to sweat traditions through a Native American man in my community via the Sweat Lodge, which we would go in on the spring solstice, followed by cooling off in the snow outside. In my twenties, I started exploring steam rooms and saunas as well, and at this point, experiences that bring together heat and cold in temporal alternation are an important part of my self-care routine. Are there ways to misuse cold plunges as some kind of test of masculinity (as the author seems to be alluding to)? Probably. But that doesn't mean that Neumann's use of the cold plunge was always inappropriate.

Also along these lines, the authors are critical of Neumann's surfing habits. I think they're right to call out a potential hypocrisy in the way that it sounds as though there were some stretches where Neumann may had had more vacation time than the average employee. On the other hand though, there is an extremely unhealthy culture of overwork in US startups, and everyone in management theory says that there's no hope of this shifting until senior leadship start leading by example (taking more personal time). During the pandemic, policies that better balance work and life, such as the four-day work week, are becoming more prevalent. Would it have been better if WeWork could take some credit for this trend? Yes. But there would have been even less chance of this happening if Neumann didn't take any personal time himself.

The authors are also critical of Neumann's Jewish religious influences (which is one of the reasons that they use the term "cult" in the title). Again, are there ways that Neumann theoretically could have lived more fully into his values around consciousness? There likely are. On the other hand, I think it is dangerous infringement on religious freedom for Neumann's observance of the sabbath to be critiqued, for example.

In summary, although there are which Neumann failed WeWork as a CEO, I feel that the authors of this book have crossed an ethical line, making the story too much about Neumann's personal life, and critiquing aspects of this personal life because they are outside the cultural norm, rather than because they detract from his fiduciary performance to his company. If journalism about business leaders is to be constructive, it should only critique personal issues when these issues directly interfere with someone's fiduciary role (I take no issues with the authors documenting the abuse of alcohol at WeWork and the way it resulted in sexual harassment). It is fine for biographies to extensively document the personal lives of historically-significant figures (such as Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs), but they are creating better journalism when they leave judgement to their readers. This book feels more like reading "People" than reading "The Financial Times," and I think this trend in business journalism will end up reinforcing eccentric leadership styles by giving them more energy and attention, rather than actually bring about any meaningful reform. ( )

If you need a book that's compelling and totally impossible to put down, that will make you wonder what the everloving fork is wrong with the idiots in finance, banking, and tech startups that just let charismatic white man after charismatic white man get away with (AND PROFIT WILDLY FROM!) this nonsense (while at the same time, the one charismatic white *woman* who did the same thing is currently going to trial) -- this is the book for you. ( )

After watching a documentary about WeWork's spectacular crash, it was clear that there was absolutely an cult-like following of founder Adam Neumann. However, I felt I needed to know more about the business aspects of the story. This book, read by the author, was truly fascinating. It filled in many of the gaps. It describes how the business developed - both its actual business as a real estate company and its aspirations to be a tech company. It went into detail about how speculative investors with money to burn were willing to put more and more money into the business. While some investors looked closely and decided to pass, others bought into a vision being sold by the firm's charismatic leader - regardless of all evidence suggesting that the firm did not have assets or contracts or any of the usual evidence of future success. Furthermore, the investors infused so much cash into WeWork that its management couldn't possibly expand any faster.

This book is well-researched and clearly written. . ( )