From award-winning Wall Street Journal reporters, “a startling portrait of one of our greatest tech visionaries, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh” (Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road ), reporting on his short life, untimely death, and what that means for our pursuit of happiness. Tony Hsieh—CEO of Zappos, Las Vegas developer, and beloved entrepreneur—was famous for spreading happiness. He lived and breathed this philosophy, instilling an ethos of joy at his company, outlining his vision for a better workplace in his New York Times bestseller Delivering Happiness . He promoted a workplace where bosses treated employees like family members, where stress was replaced by playfulness, and where hierarchies were replaced with equality and collaboration. His outlook shaped how we work today. Hsieh also aspired to build his own utopian cities, pouring millions of dollars into real estate and small businesses, first in downtown Las Vegas, Nevada—where Zappos is headquartered—and then in Park City, Utah. He gave generously to his employees and close friends, including throwing notorious Zappos parities and organizing gatherings at his home, an Airstream trailer park. When Hsieh died suddenly in late 2022, the news shook the business and tech world. Wall Street Journal reporters Kirsten Grind and Katherine Sayre discovered Hsieh’s obsession with happiness masked his darker struggles with addiction, mental health, and loneliness. In the last year of his life, he spiraled out of control, cycling out of rehab and into the waiting arms of friends who enabled his worst behavior, even as he bankrolled them from his billion-dollar fortune. Happy at Any Cost sheds light on one of our most creative, yet vulnerable, business leaders . It’s about our intense need to find “happiness” at all costs, our misguided worship of entrepreneurs, the stigmas still surrounding mental health, and how the trappings of fame can mask all types of deeper problems. In turn, it reveals how we conceptualize success—and define happiness—in our modern age. Kirsten Grind is an enterprise reporter for The Wall Street Journal , where she has worked since 2012. She has received more than a dozen national awards for her work, including a Pulitzer Prize finalist citation and a Loeb Award. Her first book, The Lost Bank , was named the best investigative book of 2012 by the Investigative Reporters & Editors association, and is coauthor of Happy at Any Cost. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Katherine Sayre is a reporter with The Wall Street Journal , where she has worked since 2019. As the gambling reporter, she writes about the Las Vegas Strip, sports betting, and the global casino industry. Before joining the Journal , she was a lead reporter for the Times-Picayune ’s investigative team in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her reporting on failures in the state’s mental health care system won a national prize from the Association of Health Care Journalists. Happy at Any Cost is her first book. She lives in Los Angeles. Prologue: “A Freak Accident” PROLOGUE “A FREAK ACCIDENT” New London, Connecticut, November 18–19, 2020 Fire Chief Thomas Curcio drove across the dark neighborhoods of New London, Connecticut, in the early morning of November 18, 2020, the crackling sound of his car scanner the only noise breaking the silence in his SUV. He had been awakened by a call to his cell phone around 3:30 a.m. by dispatch with reports of a fire and a person trapped inside a house or possibly a nearby structure. That wasn’t unusual. New London is only six square miles, with a population of about 27,000, but it is a densely populated urban area—“like someone took a slice out of New York City,” his fire marshal, Vernon Skau, likes to tell people. The small department is busy enough on most days, handling about 7,500 calls a year. A large glass cabinet at the fire station showcases pictures and artifacts from some of New London’s most memorable fires, large and small: a blown fuse at a fast-food restaurant that had charred the inside; a Samsung cell phone that had exploded. Once the largest of a string of affluent coastal towns in southeastern Connecticut, New London has been in decline since the 1980s, when the Crystal Mall opened on the outskirts of town, sucking business away from local shops on State and Bank Streets in the downtown area. A recent attempt to infuse arts into the city stalled during the Covid-19 pandemic. Chief Curcio was born and raised in New London and has worked at its fire department since he was twenty-two. As a kid, he pretended to respond to fires using his Matchbox toy cars. He had been given the top job at the department two years earlier, at an official ceremony covered by the local newspaper. Fifty-eight now, with salt-and-pepper hair and a pleasing New England accent, Curcio knows many of New London’s residents by name and its streets by heart. The address of the fire, 500 Pequot Avenue, was only ha