I barely knew Tony Hsieh. I never worked for him and generally didn’t mix with him socially. In fact, I can only recall three times the billionaire entrepreneur and I spoke for longer than five minutes. Two of those were interviews, dry and mutually discomforting; Hsieh, I quickly learned, bristled under formal structures—like, say, a traditional, sit-down interview.
But then, one day, he invited me to join him and a number of Zappos and Downtown Project employees at a Las Vegas 51s game. It was a kind of walking tailgate, beginning at Emergency Arts and ending in the upper parking lot at Cashman Field, and it had all the trappings of peak, gleeful DTP—coordinated outfits, noisemakers, a leashed llama. Hsieh and I walked together for a time, and he quietly asked questions about my writing: How long I’d been at it, what motivated me to go to work at The Seattle Times, what brought me back to Vegas.
As I spoke, Hsieh listened and nodded, sincerely engaged. He slowed our pace until we were walking alongside a woman I didn’t recognize, whom he introduced as his New York-based literary agent—the agent who had represented him in publishing his 2010 memoir Delivering Happiness.
“This is Geoff Carter,” he said. “He’s a local writer, a very good one. You should talk to him about writing a Vegas book.”
The introduction made, Hsieh drifted away to speak with someone else. We didn’t talk again for the rest of the day, and we didn’t have to. Hsieh had spotted a chance for preparation to meet opportunity, and he fulfilled it. That was his thing.
The recently published Happy at Any Cost (Simon & Schuster, $28), by Wall Street Journal writers Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre, is chockablock with stories like mine—moments when Hsieh’s restless brainstorming swelled up into introductions, ideations and, more often than not, acquisitions. Grind and Sayre capture the headlong optimism of Downtown Projects’ early days, when nearly everyone who knew Hsieh had a “he changed my life” story to tell.
But Happy at Any Cost—tellingly subtitled The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh—contrasts those testimonials with raw, heartbreaking stories from the days leading up to Hsieh’s death in November 2020. The book begins with the New London, Connecticut, fire that ultimately caused his death, at age 46, of smoke inhalation; it concludes with a list of mental health and substance abuse resources. The cost implied by the title is spelled out, only too clearly, in the narrative.
Even for someone who hardly knew Hsieh at all, Happy at Any Cost is a punishing read. Working from about 200 interviews—some on the record, most seemingly used only as deep background—and thousands of documents, photos and videos, Grind and Sayre create a portrait of Hsieh as a brilliant, agreeable but inwardly troubled man who drank heavily to find social equilibrium and routinely deprived himself of sleep and oxygen in an attempt to “hack” himself. The final chapters of the book, in which Hsieh’s cult of personality overlaps with his misguided attempts to simply feel good about himself and the world around him, are flat-out harrowing.
I had to push myself to read through those final pages, for reasons beyond the obvious. I’ve suffered acute anxiety and depression for most of my life, only recently getting a handle on them through therapy, exercise and prescribed medication. I dealt with these as-yet-undiagnosed conditions back when I was covering Hsieh and Downtown Project for Vegas Seven, constantly struggling to find a way through the human shield surrounding the CEO—some of it caring and protective, some of it opportunistic and calculating. (Happy at Any Cost doesn’t explicitly point a finger at the enablers and hangers-on within Hsieh’s inner circle, but it doesn’t avoid doing that, either.)
Beating my head against that wall took a toll. After several months of getting dressed down by my Vegas Seven editors for not delivering more incisive reporting on Hsieh’s business dealings, my chest would tighten uncomfortably whenever Downtown Project so much as issued a press release. I felt helpless, diminished—the precise opposite of the feelings that Hsieh, who once offhandedly tried to get me a book deal, wanted to instill in the people around him.
One of the messages threading through Happy at Any Cost is that no one truly knows anything about anybody’s state of mind. Even Grind and Sayre, whose accounting of Hsieh’s struggles is nothing if not sympathetic, can’t help but allow the reader to casually diagnose the temperament of a man we can no longer talk to, even in a stilted sit-down interview. But nevertheless, “Are you OK?” is a question that needs to be asked—about billionaire CEOs, about ourselves. It can be a life-changing question for someone who’s ready to hear it, and through accident or design, Happy at Any Cost positions Tony Hsieh to be the agent of that positive change, just one more time.
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