“The Best Business Book of 2020”

— The Sunday Times Best Book of the Year

“Billion Dollar Loser  [is] a wild and well-researched book by New York magazine writer Reeves Wiedeman. This is truly the Bad Blood equivalent of 2020, tracing WeWork’s astronomical rise and unbelievable work culture that seemed too good to be true—because so much of the company’s business success was rooted in exaggerations and hyperbole to begin with.

— Fortune Magazine’s Ten Best Business Books of 2020

“By turns startling and mordantly funny, this book traces the rise and fall of the co-working startup WeWork and of Adam Neumann, one of its founders. Wiedeman approaches his subject with a wealth of documentation and a deadpan incredulity at the absurdity of Neumann’s actions and ambitions. Throughout, Neumann is dislikable but not demonized. Wiedeman lays much blame on the numerous financiers and corporate bigwigs who boosted the would-be titan until the bitter end.”

— The New Yorker

“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

“Adam Neumann thought he was the next Steve Jobs. In a vivid, carefully reported drama that readers will gulp down as if it were a fast-paced novel, Reeves Wiedeman follows the charismatic Neumann as he climbs to the mountaintop, then falls off, leaving readers to ponder whether he was a charlatan or a believer, or both, and ponder what this tale teaches about those who blindly followed WeWork up the mountain.”

― Ken Auletta

The subject of “Billion Dollar Loser,” Reeves Wiedeman’s indefatigable, scrupulous account of the dubious co-working-space company WeWork, is Adam Neumann — the co-founder who eventually all but wrecked it…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, the big-picture, long-term, positively cosmic founder of the Japanese tech conglomerate Softbank. 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.”

― Walter Kirn, The New York Times Book Review

“Like John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood and Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped before it, Billion Dollar Loser traces the turmoil at a startup driven by a charismatic, arrogant founder and a business model fueled more by venture capital’s whims than common sense….providing a pocket history of the puffed-up startup marketplace of the 2010s. Wiedeman boils WeWork’s complex financial fiasco down to its juiciest parts—for a book so concerned about SEC forms, it is never, ever a slog.”

― Kate Knibbs, Wired, “13 Books You Need to Read This Fall”

“It’s a story of 21st-century boom and bust…a satisfying ticktock.”

― The New York Times, “17 New Books to Watch For in October”

“When life transcends art, tell it straight. That’s what Reeves Wiedeman has done with Billion Dollar Loser, the propulsive tale of WeWork’s, and Neumann’s, rise and fall.”

― The Atlantic

“Billion Dollar Loser” would be absorbing enough were it just about one man’s grandiosity, but Wiedeman has a larger argument to make about what Neumann represents.”

― Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

“A rollicking Hyperloop of a ride.”

― Allison Arieff, The San Francisco Chronicle

“Wiedeman debuts with a thrilling page-turner about the fantastic success and subsequent crash of WeWork…What lifts this book to excellence is Wiedeman’s ease at presenting a complex business saga both understandably and entertainingly. Readers will feel like they are in the room with Neumann and his beleaguered colleagues during every twist and turn of this fascinating corporate train wreck.”

― Publishers Weekly Starred Review, Sept. 2020