Book Review of The Cult of We by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell

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A fireworks display of exploded delusions.

Written by two journalists from the Wall Street Journal, this book seeks to research, document and explode the delusions of the We Work founder Adam Neumann, his wife, gurus, senior employees, their numerous investors and fund managers in charge of other people’s money and even his Japanese mentor and backer Masayoshi Son of Softbank. The effect is rather like an ever-swelling firework display of waste and destruction taking folly to ever greater heights, culminating in the man at the centre of a massive multi-billion-dollar sacrifice of other people’s money on the altar of New-Age virtue-signalling, being allowed to walk away with over a billion dollars (at least on paper) as a reward. At one point, Neumann even unwittingly seeks equivalence with Tony Blair by aspiring to become “president of the world!”

But there is one very important delusion which the authors do not explode, nor do they even appear to recognise it! Adam Neumann and Masayoshi Son engage in large-scale real-estate dealings in Communist China, where all property belongs to the CCP no matter how many leases, contracts and title deeds you think you have, and they go on to plot a scheme by which they would not only control all the real-estate finance in the United States and the Free World, but also in the very unfree world of Communist China. Their vaulted ambition is duly mocked by the authors, but at no point do the authors conceive that even modest and ostensibly profitable investments in the Chinese property market or Chinese industry are inherently delusional. Because to do that, would expose the nakedness of an awful lot of readers of the Wall Street Journal. With that important caveat, this book gets a four-star recommendation to readers.

The Cult of We is published in the UK by Mudlark on the 22^nd of July 2021.