Book review: The Cult of We

Adam Neumann and his wife Rebekah Neumann in 2018. Photo / Taylor Hill/FilmMagic

The Cult of We
by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
(Mudlark, $40)

In 2021, WeWork is a punchline. The commercial real estate company is the basis of a scathing new documentary, the podcast WeCrashed, countless think pieces about greed and hubris, and now this beast of a book written by Wall Street Journal reporters Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell, who covered WeWork for years.

Following the global financial crisis, New York was replete with under-utilised office space. Israeli entrepreneur Adam Neumann (who once sold pants with reinforced knees for crawling babies) saw an opportunity to harness the co-working trend and capitalise on cheap rent. He negotiated leases for empty buildings, filled them with Ikea furniture, pot plants and inspirational artwork (We Love Work) and watched the young freelancers and small businesses move in with their laptops and bushy-tailed ambition.

WeWork was an immediate success but it wasn't a big enough success for Neumann, who curated fancier workspaces with vintage arcade games and high-end lounge spaces, taking on more and more ambitious projects. He launched the co-living apartment business WeLive, the luxury gym business WeWork Wellness, and the private school WeGrow.

In all of this Neumann was enabled by his wife Rebekah, Gwyneth Paltrow's cousin, who shared the Goop founder's affiliation with the woo-woo and taste for the finer things. She was the force behind the establishment of WeGrow.

Meanwhile, buzz grew around WeWork, which was legitimately useful for many people. Fans found the offices to be uniquely collaborative, friendly and fun workspaces, with a family feel and a work-around-the-clock culture. Investors included actor Ashton Kutcher and Japanese bank SoftBank.

While Neumann was renting out office space, he convinced investors (without evidence) that he was actually running a sophisticated tech start-up. He started to make grand statements about how WeWork was changing the world. (Sample piffle: "We are a community company committed to maximum global impact. Our mission is to elevate the world's consciousness. We have built a worldwide platform that supports growth, shared experiences and true success.") And through the power of his personality, his gift for spinning fibs into dollars and Silicon Valley's ongoing search for the next big thing, he managed to build his commercial real estate company into a "tech unicorn" valued at $47 billion. Within a few short years WeWork was bigger than Uber or Airbnb.

There are many parallels between Neumann and Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, the Silicon Valley darling who claimed her technology allowed comprehensive lab testing using a single drop of a patient's blood. Both entrepreneurs desperately wanted to be successful, both were secretive and a bit weird, and both were feted by people who should have recognised the con from miles off. While Holmes sucked in the Washington DC set, Neumann appealed to the Hollywood Kabbalah crew.

For readers who love to understand a business bust, The Cult of We delivers more scrupulously researched detail than you would ever want. (More storytelling and less fact-dumping would have been preferable.) Will it warn off investors from making similar mistakes in the future? Not a chance.

Reviewed by Eleanor Black