One of the memorable details in Billion Dollar Loser, a new account of the rise and fall of the office-sharing company WeWork and its founder Adam Neumann is a list of accoutrements Neumann’s family required for a company campout in 2018. The list includes three air conditioners, two fridges, a signature Range Rover and a Mercedes V-Class, three dinosaur-themed buggies, edamame packets, “4 Aesop Gardenia Shampoo,” and two bartenders. The document is so astonishing in its extravagance that any commentary would detract, and author Reeves Wiedeman simply prints it on four whole pages of his book.
The last part of the list is devoted to alcohol. The family was to be provided with two bottles of Highland Park whisky (thirty years old, at about $1,000 each), among other spirits, and also wine, twenty-four bottles of red and twenty-four of white—all of which, a reader of Jewish sensibilities might be mortified to learn, had to be kosher.
The story of WeWork’s crash, with its delectable details and doses of schadenfreude, has exited the business pages and entered mainstream culture via several podcasts and a Hulu documentary, but the fast-paced and entertaining Billion Dollar Loser is the most thorough treatment so far. Wiedeman, who first came to the subject when he wrote a skeptical profile of Neumann for New York Magazine, has an eye for the tawdry detail and a keen sense of the gap between the ditzy, do-good rhetoric of WeWork and the voracious practices that fueled the company into the start-up stratosphere and then, a heady decade later, sent it hurtling to earth. Judaism isn’t the focus of the book, but it’s an unavoidable presence throughout, the kosher wine being only one example. The WeWork story is a capitalist story, a moral story, and just a great story. But it is also, unfortunately, a Jewish story.
Read the whole thing.