The Story Behind the Story of the WeWork Scandal: A Publishing Case Study

While the scandal surrounding the tech unicorn WeWork and its founder Adam Neumann never quite reached the level of infamy that struck Theranos, it was still a story that permeated the news cycle, ultimately becoming the subject of several projects across the creative industries.

So, why did this capture the attention of the general public? Simply put, the story has a ‘cult of personality’ founder, the company had become a household name by the time of the IPO filing, and the scandal had just enough absurdity to ignite news readers’ curiosities—and, of course, in the span of a month, the unicorn’s valuation fell from $47 billion to just below $10 billion.

The Rise of WeWork

Founded in 2010, WeWork entered the burgeoning tech startup space as the solution for the future of work. Riding the continued fallout of the 2008 financial recession, the company secured building leases at a fraction of their value, renovating the spaces into trendy shared office spaces made to suit the lifestyle of the growing millennial entrepreneur and freelance workforce. From serving beer on tap to offering a sense of community in a traditionally isolating role, WeWork expanded to nearly every major city in the world, growing at a pace that impressed the investor community and ultimately led to a $47 billion valuation over the summer of 2019. It is this sense of community and brand that WeWork became known for. They weren’t just selling office space—the founders argued time and again that they were always a tech company and never a real estate company—they were selling an ideal, an evolved lifestyle.

The Fall of WeWork

Behind the scenes, the story gets a bit more complicated. It’s surprisingly a story full of sex, tequila, and the wheelings and dealings of a charismatic, barefoot CEO. By the mid-2010s, the company was full of bright-eyed recent graduates eager to change the world and collect the paycheck and prestige that came along with working at one of the hottest tech companies while they were at it, growing to 12,500 employees by June 2019. WeWork had a ‘work hard, party harder’ culture with Neumann calling for trays of tequila shots to regularly be passed around work meetings and the company featured mandatory annual team away days that were more like Glastonbury or Coachella festivals than your typical powerpoint-filled corporate planning day.?

On August 14, 2019, the coworking company WeWork filed for an IPO. Thirty-five days later The Wall Street Journal published an exposé by Eliot Brown highlighting baffling business practices and startling financial discrepancies that were found sprinkled throughout the company’s public filing. Just four days later, the eccentric founder and CEO Adam Neumann stepped down. The company pulled its IPO, lost its major funders, and was nearly bankrupt by the end of 2019.

It wasn’t just the wildly toxic work culture that piqued news readers' interest, the company’s financials were also in shambles, so much so that the New York Attorney General was reportedly investigating the company and Neumann personally by November 2019. As much as Adam Neumann insisted WeWork was a cultural revolution and not a commercial real estate company, financially speaking the company was absurdly overextended in terms of building leases and renovation costs. It also probably did not help the company’s financials that the founder reportedly spent an undisclosed amount to helicopter in musician The Weeknd for WeWork’s 2nd Annual Summit in 2015 and allegedly $1 million plus stock to fly in The Chainsmokers for the following year’s festivities.???

The Story Behind the Story: The Multimedia Environment Surrounding WeWork

Similar to the energy that surrounded the story of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, this scandalous story of WeWork and Adam Neumann transcended the traditional business and investor communities and gripped the general public. Following two months of mainstream news coverage, including an in-depth, long-form investigation in the Atlantic, two book deal announcements on the scandal were announced.

In November 2019, W.W. Norton announced the signing of a yet-to-be-titled book deal with Fast Company reporter Katrina Brooker on the failures of WeWork, which was followed in December by the announcement of a movie deal made from the rights of the title in addition to a separate documentary deal based on Brooker’s work. Not to be surpassed, also in November 2019, PRH Crown announced the signing of a book deal for The Cult of We written by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell, the investigative reporters who broke the WeWork story just two months prior, and the week following the movie deal, another production company announced a Cult of We scripted TV series based on the Wall Street Journal reporters’ in-progress manuscript. But that’s not all. Hachette Little Brown also signed on a book detailing the fall of Adam Neumann. Released as Billion Dollar Loser, the third signed book on the topic was written by New York Magazine journalist Reeves Wiedeman and first mentioned on the Little Brown website in May 2020.

Amidst all this dealmaking, The Wondery gets a jump on long-form content for public consumption and releases the first episode of their podcast WeCrashed on January 1, 2020. Just under two months later, there’s another announcement about a scripted TV series, this time culminating from a deal with Apple TV+ and the team at Wondery.

For unreported reasons, the Brooker project remains unpublished and the attached movie and documentary did not move beyond the idea stage. But the remaining projects on the WeWork story moved forward. First, Wiedeman’s book Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork was published in October 2020 to a strong reception. Then, Hulu in partnership with the news organization Forbes released the documentary WeWork: or the Making and Breaking of a $47B Unicorn in March 2021. This project was Forbes' first foray into documentary-making and was based on reporting done by their in-house team. Originally planned for publication in March 2021, PRH Crown’s The Cult of We: WeWork and the Great Start-Up Delusion was published in July 2021, receiving a lukewarm reception in comparison to the Little Brown release nine months prior. The whole media circus has culminated, at least for the time being, in the release of the Apple TV+ scripted series WeCrashed starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway. Interestingly, this series was released the same month as The Dropout, the Theranos scripted series mentioned in the previous section.?

Analyzing the Effects of the Multimedia Environment on Book Sales

As Adam Neumann’s scandal did not quite reach the same level of Elizabeth Holmes’ massive fraud, the WeWork story has not had the same dramatic evolutions that contributed to the saliency of the Theranos story as highlighted in the above section. But it is still an apt case to analyze given that scandals that will pique the public’s interest and be considered by commissioning editors will cover varying degrees of wrongdoing and intrigue. In the case of WeWork, the competitive landscape could be considered a more familiar one to publishing houses—other publishers.?

In the figure above, the same datasets are overlaid—news mentions as the blue scatter plots, units of books sold as the line graphs, and important dates as the red markers. In this case, though, three sets of book sales data have been included—units sold of Billion Dollar Loser in orange, total units sold of The Cult of We in gray, and units sold for both books combined in yellow. It is pertinent to note here that NPD BookScan data was unavailable for the hardback version of Billion Dollar Loser, which limits the scope of this analysis. This means that the analysis here does not start with the release of Wiedeman’s book which was October 10, 2020 but rather with the sales data of the paperback which was released July 6, 2021 in the U.S.?????

Finding Correlation???

While originally planned for a spring release, The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion was published in hardback in the U.S. on July 20, 2021, just two weeks after the paperback release of Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork. The Cult of We received decent attention, with 2,192 units sold in its first week. Billion Dollar Loser received a modest bump in sales following the release of this competing title, with 40 percent more units sold than the week prior.

Interestingly, as the weeks go on, the graph illuminates that sales data for the Billion Dollar Loser paperback and for The Cult of We total units follow approximately the same trends. Between the release of the second book and the release of the TV show, there are a few visible upticks in sales, with the peaks showing correlation across all three trend lines. With the overlaid news data, it could be deduced that topic saliency in the news affected sales. However, as WeWork is still a fully operational business, frequency of news mentions is less likely to be an obvious indicator of increased consumer interest in the related books. With Theranos, as the company folded in 2018, any news mentions were likely to be about the scandal, but with WeWork, news mentions are more likely to be about current business operations and would have to be analyzed by topic and sentiment to more clearly distinguish any influence. Additional research would have to be undertaken to prove causation of the sales bumps seen throughout this period.

In a different sphere of the multimedia landscape, WeCrashed was released on Apple TV+ on March 18, 2020 amidst a flurry of entertainment news activity about the high profile cast, which directly increased the saliency of the WeWork scandal. As with The Dropout, this scripted TV series on the downfall of Adam Neumann was released episodically—episodes were released weekly to the streaming platform with the final episode being released on April 22, 2022. There is a clear correlation between the release of the scripted TV series and books sold. In the six weeks that the show aired, Billion Dollar Loser sold an average of 77 books—nearly doubling the number of books sold the week after the show’s release—and The Cult of We sold an average of 142 books per week. Billion Dollar Loser saw a 63 percent increase over the previous six weeks of sales data and The Cult of We saw a 255 percent increase. Overall, the total number of books about WeWork sold increased by 153 percent in response to the scripted TV show.???????

And, while the data showing how hardcover book sales reacted to the release of the documentary is missing from this analysis, given the above findings, it can be hypothesized that sales of the hardcover version of Billion Dollar Loser enjoyed an uptick in the week following the release.

Conclusion: A Complementary Relationship within the WeWork Multimedia Landscape

Seeing the runaway success that Bad Blood enjoyed, publishers were eager to not miss the ‘next Bad Blood.’ As such, when the news of the WeWork scandal survived multiple news cycles, editors jumped at the opportunity to sign on an author to do a deep dive into the newest startup failure. Like Theranos, the WeWork story had a charismatic founder, a unicorn label and an eye-wateringly high valuation, the respect and interest of the business community, and the potential for a lawsuit. And unlike Theranos, WeWork was already a household name, being a company millions of people in major cities either used or walked past on a daily basis.?

In line with the findings from the previous case study and the theory of the ‘movie effect,’ a positive relationship can be seen between the release of the scripted TV series on WeWork and the sales of books about the company. Interestingly, though, the above sales data reflects the perils of cannibalization within the publishing industry itself, rather than threats from the wider multimedia landscape. While one book deal never came to fruition, two books remained in the WeWork sphere, both outlining the same story in a similar narrative, investigative journalism format and dividing sales. Though neither book was named to the TIME’s best nonfiction books list and total sales across the topic remain lower than the sales of the six-year-old Theranos book even at the writing of this report, the respective publications each received positive attention, with Billion Dollar Loser being a New York Times bestseller and The Cult of We being named ‘Book of the Year’ by Financial Times, NPR, and Fortune. ??

Overall, it can be concluded for this case study that the release of other entertainment formats on the same topic can indeed be complementary for published books. More research would need to be conducted to understand the relationship between the release of a podcast before the first book and the eventual book sales. The additional hardcover sales data for Billion Dollar Loser would also be needed to better understand the effect, if any, the 2021 publication date had on The Cult of We.