Book of the week: The Cult of We by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell

Two Wall Street Journal scribes chart the downfall of WeWork’s ‘messiah’

WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann
WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017
(Image credit: Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

When Adam Neumann got on a private jet, the crew “would often be in for a rough ride”, said Tom Knowles in The Times. His friends would down shots, spit tequila at each other and throw up. On one occasion there was “so much marijuana smoke in the cabin that the crew were forced to pull out the jet’s oxygen masks and put them on”.

Neumann isn’t a rock star or a Hollywood actor. “He was the boss of a company that provided office space on flexible leases in trendy-looking buildings.” Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell’s “fascinating and highly entertaining” new book is “packed with marmalade-dropper stories” like this about Neumann and his mismanagement of WeWork, a shared office space company that many investors mistook for the “new Apple”.

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