The question of whether money can buy happiness recurs throughout a new biography of the Zappos executive Tony Hsieh, who died in 2020 after years of rampant drug abuse and erratic behavior.
—but there’s usually a moment when the “founder” comes up with some innovation or solution that transforms an idea into a gigantic, distinct, and scalable business. For Hsieh, this moment came when he and one of Zappos’s early workers decided to focus entirely on the customer experience. This decision prompted the company’s move to suburban Las Vegas, where they could find workers who had years of experience in hospitality and customer service.
Hsieh’s Vegas years, according to Au-Yeung and Jeans, were filled with booze and a type of academically approved self-help that centered around studies of happiness. Hsieh became obsessed with the question of company culture and wrote a book, “,” which resulted in a lengthy press tour and a borderline-fraudulent stay at the top of the best-seller list , and which touted his four principles.
It doesn’t take a raving anti-corporatist to point out how silly, trite, and manipulative all this sounds. Over time, Hsieh’s interest in junk psychology extended beyond happiness and into even stupider realms. He became obsessed with Neil Strauss’s “The Game,” the infamous guide for so-called pickup artists which taught men how to manipulate women via techniques like “negging” and “peacocking.
Au-Yeung and Jeans present all this information without much commentary. Although their book has considerable strengths—exceptional reporting, for one—what it lacks is a compelling central theory about its subject. The authors portray Hsieh as a narcissist and an addict who tossed around half-baked ideas and rarely saw them through, leaving everyone else to pick up the pieces. That certainly seems true.
The journalist’s need to humanize everything in sight can be useful, even revelatory, but it can also obscure. Hsieh, in the end, was a rich guy who, early in his career, used his Harvard connections and some seed money to buy a series of lotto tickets in the tech boom, and then used his expanding wealth and influence to spread a bunch of marketing, in the form of pseudo-psychology, into the world. He slept with his employees and terrorized his closest friends.
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