Who doesn’t love to see a tycoon ruined? Who doesn’t love the tale of a proud titan laid low by his own flaws and by the gods, or by their current equivalent, the markets? In America, where we moralise our money and monetise our morals, fat cats who go bust tend to be viewed as cautionary figures, singular exemplars of malfeasance, not routine casualties of the fickle system that exalted them in the first place.
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