The Cult of We

“[The] ultimate portrayal of … an empire built on sand.”—Newsweek“Like Bad Blood … The Cult of We is novelistic in detail and often thrilling… . It’s like watching a car careening toward a wall at 90 miles an hour.”—The Washington Post“If I had to make a list of top five business books of all time, this would be on it. It’s just so damn engrossing.”—Christopher Mims, Wall Street Journal tech columnist“A juicy guided tour through the highly leveraged, not-quite-rags-to-billion-dollar-parachute saga of WeWork and its cofounder Adam Neumann … Brown and Farrell show an agility for explaining key business dynamics… . It’s also very funny.”—The New York Times“Absorbing … The Cult of We is both a ticktock of Neumann’s self-immolation and a primer on the ways and mores of a start-up culture populated by visionaries, grifters and moneymen… . Like Bad Blood … The Cult of We is novelistic in detail and often thrilling… . It’s like watching a car careening toward a wall at 90 miles an hour.” —Allison Stewart, The Washington Post“Deeply reported and compellingly written.”—Harvard Business Review“Only a handful of books capture the zeitgeist of a business era. Add this one, a wild saga that caps a decade when founder-worshipping investors threw billions at well-spun visions—even those of a megalomaniac whose new-age real estate enterprise’s losses piled up as fast as its valuation climbed. The duo who broke the story of WeWork’s rise and fall have now artfully fleshed it out in a book whose colorful narrative is undergirded by deep context about the times, and enablers, that made Adam Neumann possible.”—John Helyar, #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of Barbarians at the Gate“The Emperor’s New Clothes of the Silicon Valley age.”—The Real Deal“Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell owned the WeWork story as it was unfolding. And now, with The Cult of We, we finally get the chronicle we deserve of a madness that consumed venture capital, corporate America, and the world.”—Charles Duhigg, New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Habit“The lines between vision, bullshit, and fraud are narrow, and if you tell a thirty-year-old male that he is Jesus Christ, he’s inclined to believe you. The idolatry of founders in Silicon Valley will rage until the music stops playing. The Cult of We is a cautionary tale and a crisp page-turner.”—Scott Galloway, New York Times bestselling author of The Four and professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business “Whether you know a lot or a little about the fall of WeWork, you won’t be able to put down The Cult of We by Wall Street Journal reporters Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. Their book is teeming with incredible details. While heroes are in short supply, the schadenfreude you’ll feel about the spectacular downfall of those who deserve it is delightful.”—Bethany McLean, New York Times bestselling co-author of The Smartest Guys in the Room

Eliot Brown covers startups and venture capital for The Wall Street Journal. He previously worked at The New York Observer and is a graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.