Billion Dollar Loser

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 Tragicomic play-by-play of Neumann's misadventures. . . . 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 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 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 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 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