Strictly Business: WeWork's Big Con + The Decline of Internet News

Media lately has been overtaken by tantalizingly scandalous stories of founders and CEOs behaving badly, from Uber to Theranos to FTX. If, like me, you can’t get enough of these accounts and the psychological mindfucks they entail, you’ll find something to savor in these two books.

Happy reading!

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork’

by Reeves Wiedeman
Read it if you like: Bad Blood and the story of Theranos, Silicon Valley villains, the grifty side of startups

The conclusive story of Adam Neumann provides an inside look at WeWork’s empire built on quicksand and the many who were ensnared along the way.

The most enthralling business book I’ve read since Jon Carreyrou’s Theranos saga, Bad Blood, this inside story is truly stranger than fiction. Thanks to his inside access to Neumann and hundreds of former employees, investors, allies and enemies, Wiedeman tracks Neumann’s unlikely rise and remarkable fall along with the chaos baked into every day at the company. It’s a captivating behind the scenes look that peels back the curtain and will have readers incredulously asking: How did so many smart people get played? You’ll laugh, you’ll gasp, and you’ll rage against the infernal Silicon Valley startup machine.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry and Delusion in the Billion Dollar Race to Go Viral

by Ben Smith
Read it if you like: Learning about the media’s dysfunction, the history of journalism, the early internet

Smith tells the story of the modern business model of journalism by way of two rival companies: Buzzfeed and Gawker, and their respective founders. This history is full of eccentric characters and insights into how we got to where we are today.

As the former Editor in Chief, Smith had a front row seat to much of what is discussed in this book, making for an absorbing if slightly inside baseball account of how digital media got to the place where it is today. Staid in its retelling, this offers little in the way of accountability or analysis, and produces merely a play by play account of the early internet aughts. Readers will likely find pockets of interest and plateaus of boredom throughout, but worth reading for anyone interested in the making of the modern media.