I heard about The Cult of We on Bookstagram, and since I have enjoyed the previous business-crime books that I read, I put this on my TBR list. And because my TBR list is a monster by now, I didn’t actually get around to this book until my finance professor assigned us a reading on WeWork, which reminded me of The Cult of We and bumped it up the TBR list.

The Cult of We traces the history of WeWork, from its founding to the ousting of its founder and former CEO, Adam Neumann. It’s a pretty long book – 38 chapters in all – and it’s a bit like reading a train wreck. About 10 chapters into the book, I was wondering why no one other than the CEO of Regus seemed to realise that there was something suspicious about WeWork. And yet, it kept succeeding, for another twenty-ish chapters until you get to the IPO and things finally start to crash. If I’m not wrong, WeWork lasted longer than Theranos (but then again, WeWork had an actual product, it was just unprofitable). By the way, John Carreyrou tells the story of Theranos in his book Bad Blood and it is well worth a read.

One thing I thought would be interesting would be to compare the atmosphere that Neumann and his wife, Rebekah built with the traits of cults that Amanda Montell mentions in her book Cultish. It was interesting to see the way the Neumanns based everything on the word “We”, and while we don’t get much direct access to the thoughts of the WeWork staff, I imagine that stock options aside, one reason why people joined the company in the early days and took a lower pay was because they believed in the company’s mission and its own hype about being a community. In a way, it does fulfil the need for identity and belonging, but I think the cult members here are the WeWork staff rather than its paying members.

Apart from considering how WeWork might be a cult, The Cult of We was an eye-opening look at just how far charisma and willpower can take you. Neumann raised billions of dollars and got the WeWork board of directors to authorise ridiculous purchases like a private jet because they believed that they needed a founder like him to help the company succeed. Even when he was being ridiculous and they knew he was being ridiculous, they still gave in – it’s honestly a little hard to believe! Truth really can be stranger than fiction at times.

Incidentally, and this is unrelated to the book, but I used to use SoftBank as my phone carrier when I was in Japan, so to see Masayoshi Son and Softbank play such a big role in the book was a surprise. I looked up the Vision Fund, and it looks like there was a brief period of profitability early this year and then it’s making a loss again.

Overall, this was a fascinating and rather alarming book. Fascinating because the stories of businesses that are almost-but-not-quite scams and creative accounting (community-adjusted EBITA deserves to be laughed at) will hold your attention as you try to figure out how and why people let this happen, but also alarming because if this has happened before, how do you know it won’t happen again?

Featured Image: Photo from Canva