
The Cult of We
WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion
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Narrated by:
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Thérèse Plummer
About this listen
Wall Street Journal best seller
A Financial Times, Fortune, and NPR Best Book of the Year
“The riveting, definitive account of WeWork, one of the wildest business stories of our time.” (Matt Levine, Money Stuff columnist, Bloomberg Opinion)
The definitive story of the rise and fall of WeWork (also depicted in the upcoming Apple TV+ series WeCrashed, starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway), by the real-life journalists whose Wall Street Journal reporting rocked the company and exposed a financial system drunk on the elixir of Silicon Valley innovation.
Longlisted for the Financial Times and Mckinsey Business Book of the Year Award
WeWork would be worth $10 trillion, more than any other company in the world. It wasn’t just an office space provider. It was a tech company - an AI startup, even. Its WeGrow schools and WeLive residences would revolutionize education and housing. One day, mused founder Adam Neumann, a Middle East peace accord would be signed in a WeWork. The company might help colonize Mars. And Neumann would become the world’s first trillionaire.
This was the vision of Neumann and his primary cheerleader, SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son. In hindsight, their ambition for the company, whose primary business was subletting desks in slickly designed offices, seems like madness. Why did so many intelligent people - from venture capitalists to Wall Street elite - fall for the hype? And how did WeWork go so wrong?
In little more than a decade, Neumann transformed himself from a struggling baby clothes salesman into the charismatic, hard-partying CEO of a company worth $47 billion - on paper. With his long hair and feel-good mantras, the six-foot-five Israeli transplant looked the part of a messianic truth teller. Investors swooned, and billions poured in.
Neumann dined with the CEOs of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, entertaining a parade of power brokers desperate to get a slice of what he was selling: the country’s most valuable startup, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and a generation-defining moment.
Soon, however, WeWork was burning through cash faster than Neumann could bring it in. From his private jet, sometimes clouded with marijuana smoke, he scoured the globe for more capital. Then, as WeWork readied a Hail Mary IPO, it all fell apart. Nearly $40 billion of value vaporized in one of corporate America’s most spectacular meltdowns.
Peppered with eye-popping, never-before-reported details, The Cult of We is the gripping story of careless and often absurd people - and the financial system they have made.
©2021 Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell (P)2021 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"[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)
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Now a number-one international best seller, Billion Dollar Whale is "an epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale" (Publishers Weekly), revealing how a young social climber from Malaysia pulled off one of the biggest heists in history. In 2009, a chubby, mild-mannered graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business named Jho Low set in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude—one that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system.
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Couldn’t stop listening!
- By N Lane on 10-05-18
By: Bradley Hope, and others
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American Kingpin
- The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road
- By: Nick Bilton
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2011, a 26-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine website hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything - drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons - free of the government's watchful eye. It wasn't long before the media got wind of the new website where anyone - not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers - could buy and sell contraband detection-free.
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An honest portrait of DPR
- By Victor on 05-18-17
By: Nick Bilton
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Bitcoin Billionaires
- By: Ben Mezrich
- Narrated by: Will Damron
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Ben Mezrich's 2009 best seller, The Accidental Billionaires, is the definitive account of Facebook's founding and the basis for the Academy Award-winning film The Social Network. Two of the story's iconic characters are Harvard students Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss: identical twins, Olympic rowers, and foils to Mark Zuckerberg. Bitcoin Billionaires is the story of the brothers’ redemption and revenge in the wake of their epic legal battle with Facebook.
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Misleading Title - Mostly "Winkelvi Memoirs"
- By kameir on 06-07-19
By: Ben Mezrich
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Money Men
- A Hot Startup, A Billion Dollar Fraud, A Fight for the Truth
- By: Dan McCrum
- Narrated by: Dan McCrum
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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When investigative journalist Dan McCrum first came across Wirecard, the hot new tech company that looked poised to challenge Silicon Valley, it all looked a little too good to be true: offices were sprouting up all over the world, and they were reporting runaway growth. In the space of a few short years, the company had come from nowhere to overtake industry giants like Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank on the stock market. As McCrum began to dig deeper, he encountered a story stranger and more compelling than he could have imagined.
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Interesting book but…
- By Rock Climber on 06-11-23
By: Dan McCrum
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The Woman Who Fooled the World
- By: Beau Donelly, Nick Toscano
- Narrated by: James Saunders
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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Belle Gibson convinced the world she had healed herself from terminal brain cancer with a healthy diet. She built a global business based upon her claims. There was just one problem: she'd never had cancer. In 2015, journalists uncovered the truth: this hero of the wellness world, with over 200,000 followers, international book deals and a best-selling smartphone app, was a fraud.
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Must listen
- By NutriGal on 02-10-18
By: Beau Donelly, and others
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Den of Thieves
- By: James B. Stewart
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 19 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Pulitzer Prize winner James B. Stewart shows for the first time how four of the biggest names on Wall Street - Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Martin Siegel, and Dennis Levine - created the greatest insider-trading ring in financial history and almost walked away with billions - until a team of downtrodden detectives triumphed over some of America's most expensive lawyers to bring this powerful quartet to justice.
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Awesome book
- By Lars Tackmann on 10-23-17
By: James B. Stewart
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Too Big to Fail
- The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System--and Themselves
- By: Andrew Ross Sorkin
- Narrated by: William Hughes
- Length: 21 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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A real-life thriller about the most tumultuous period in America's financial history by an acclaimed New York Times reporter. Andrew Ross Sorkin delivers the first true, behind-the-scenes, moment-by-moment account of how the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression developed into a global tsunami.
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Best Book About Meltdown
- By Chuck on 12-08-09
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The Founders
- The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
- By: Jimmy Soni
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 18 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Today, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. As a group, they have driven 21st-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired.
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Wonderful, Engaging & Insightful
- By Ismael Becerra on 02-26-22
By: Jimmy Soni
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When Genius Failed
- The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management
- By: Roger Lowenstein
- Narrated by: Roger Lowenstein
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Abridged
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Roger Lowenstein, the bestselling author of Buffett, captures Long-Term's roller-coaster ride in gripping detail. Drawing on confidential internal memos and interviews with dozens of key players, Lowenstein crafts a story that reads like a first-rate thriller from beginning to end. He explains not just how the fund made and lost its money, but what it was about the personalities of Long-Term's partners, the arrogance of their mathematical certainties, and the late-nineties culture of Wall Street that made it all possible.
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When Genius Failed
- By Sean on 12-17-08
By: Roger Lowenstein
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Barbarians at the Gate
- The Fall of RJR Nabisco
- By: Bryan Burrough, John Helyar
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 22 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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A number-one New York Times best seller and arguably the best business narrative ever written, Barbarians at the Gate is the classic account of the fall of RJR Nabisco. An enduring masterpiece of investigative journalism by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, it includes a new afterword by the authors that brings this remarkable story of greed and double-dealings up to date 20 years after the famed deal.
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Good book but too dense
- By Andrew M. on 08-01-21
By: Bryan Burrough, and others
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The Fund
- Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend
- By: Rob Copeland
- Narrated by: Rob Copeland, Will Damron
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Ray Dalio does not want you to listen to this audiobook. Late last year, when the billionaire founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund on the planet, announced that he was stepping down from the company he started out of his apartment nearly 50 years ago, the news made headlines around the world. Dalio cultivated an aura of international admiration and fame thanks to his company’s eye-popping success, coupled with a mystique he encouraged with frequent media appearances, celebrity hobnobbing, and his bestselling book, Principles.
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Best finance book I've read in years
- By Aaron on 12-16-23
By: Rob Copeland
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Empire of Pain
- The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
- By: Patrick Radden Keefe
- Narrated by: Patrick Radden Keefe
- Length: 18 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The prize-winning and best-selling author of Say Nothing presents a grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.
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Full Account of the Sackler Conspiracy
- By Edward Bisch on 04-13-21
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The Trading Game
- A Confession
- By: Gary Stevenson
- Narrated by: Gary Stevenson
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Ever since he was a kid, kicking broken soccer balls on the run-down streets of East London, Gary Stevenson dreamed of something bigger. As luck would have it, he was good at numbers. At the London School of Economics, wearing tracksuits and sneakers, Stevenson shocked his posh classmates by winning a competition called “The Trading Game.” The prize? A golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader at Citibank.
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Great substance and storytelling
- By Daniel Tunkelang on 03-07-24
By: Gary Stevenson
What listeners say about The Cult of We
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- Anne
- 09-24-21
Fantastic
Genius reporting and a genuinely fun read. Six out of five stars. Very good book.
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- Anonymous User
- 01-01-22
fascinating story
this is a terrific description of the We Work story and the obnoxious, self-absorbed and arrogant Adam Neumann and his spoiled flakey wife. well hindsight might be 20/20, a blind person could have seen that something wasn't right with the We Work propaganda. The perfect storm of greed that brought down this company is the same greed and stupidity that caused the entire housing market to crash in 2005 to 2012.
The reading was a bit off putting with way too many inflections and upswings in her voice.
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- Ihereou
- 12-11-22
Yeah. It's pretty good; however...
The narratior's performance is really good; however some parts feel out of place. I would recommend listen to this one before sleep. Her voice can calm even though it's about a man almost building a cult.
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- JB
- 08-16-21
An astounding story
Definitely worth reading. A look into the madness behind WeWork. A sobering story and a cautionary tale. Great narration.
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- Bill Dunn
- 04-19-22
Great listen!
Had to stop listening to this one!
A great ride from beginning to end - much more detail but just as much drama as We Crashed. Loved it!
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- znorthface
- 06-14-22
Entertaining and wild
Didn’t realize how wild the scene was, but did a great job of narrating the founding till it became a traded company.
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- Unhappy Sirius Camper
- 08-14-21
Great companion to "Billion Dollar Loser"
I really enjoyed "Billion Dollar Loser", so I had some trepidation about "The Cult of We". On the one hand, I wanted more of the story. On the other, I was worried that it would be duplicative.
The two books are actually complimentary: "Billion Dollar Loser" focuses more on the cult of Adam Neumann and examples of his ego and rage-inducing narcissism, while "The Cult of We" focuses more on the financial side of the debacle. "The Cult of We" also goes into great detail on startup financing and all of the related craziness of the last 20 years. I could see "The Cult of We" as a standard textbook in MBA programs.
Fast pace, great narration. Really enjoyed it.
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- Anonymous User
- 08-15-21
Less spicy than other "Business True Crime"
Adam had good intentions, believed in his company and simply got drifted too far into his fantasies, convincing investors along the way.
Compared with Elizabeth Holmes in Bad Blood, he is just an over-dreamy entrepreneur, no harm intended.
It was nice and interesting to hear the full story behind this epic rise and fall.
Therese Plummer did an excellent job narrating!
I wish more books were read by voices like hers.
I do 100% recommend Bad Blood.
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- BENNIE RHEEDER
- 10-05-23
Greed and gluttony
Great factual account of the WeWork disaster. Recommended for people who enjoy modern stories of greed, hubris and cult like organisations.
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- Privatebuyer
- 08-05-21
How to give a horrible story five stars
The epilogue begins by quoting F Scott Fitzgerald: “They were careless people.. “ That is an understatement. I make my living reading, writing and planning land-based investments. This is the second book I have read this summer on the Wework scandal. Well written and clearly told this book is about more than the waste of billions of US dollars at Wework. This book has made me more frequently nauseous and enraged than anything else I have ever read. Its worse than the stories about ponzi schemers. This story is about our penchant for messianic figures leading us to a Midas nirvana. It is about the myth of what is technology. It is about financing slight of hand promises rather than tangible goods, services and products. If you wish to become angry or ill, read this very good and clear book --. Avarice, narcissism and greed, or should that be gluttony. No they were not careless; they were intentional.
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