Better.com boss apologises for firing 900 staff on Zoom call

[brooklynite]

Source: The Guardian

The chief executive of a US mortgage company who fired 900 employees on a Zoom call has apologised for failing to show “respect and appreciation” for the staff he sacked.

The founder and chief executive of better.com, Vishal Garg, expressed contrition in a message posted on his company’s website.

Garg said he was sorry for the way “I handled the layoffs last week” after staff uproar over the video call last Wednesday.

The 43-year-old added: “I failed to show the appropriate amount of respect and appreciation for the individuals who were affected and for their contributions to Better. I own the decision to do the layoffs but in communicating it I blundered the execution.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/dec/08/bettercom-boss-vishal-garg-apologises-firing-staff-zoom-call

[bearsfootball516]

1. Oh, well that makes everything better.

[marble falls]

2. His apology was pretty damn blithe, too. What does it do for the "terminated"?

[benfranklin1776]

7. Exactly. He's a pure psychopath.

Definitely part of the 12 percent of CEO’s
that it is estimated possess this Manson -like callous contempt for their fellow human
beings. (That’s probably a low estimate based on the human carnage they cause that we see reported on on a regular basis.) 🤬

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-psychopathic-ceo/

[dalton99a]

3. Vishal Garg is a major asshole

https://www.thedailybeast.com/bettercom-ceo-vishal-garg-threatened-to-burn-his-business-partner-alive-now-hes-a-billionaire

He Threatened to Burn His Business Partner Alive. Now He’s a Billionaire.
Vishal Garg is a billionaire, thanks to his SoftBank-backed mortgage lender Better.com. There are a lot of questions about how he got here.
Noah Kirsch
Updated Aug. 19, 2021 2:40PM ET / Published Aug. 19, 2021 5:02AM ET

Last fall, employees at one of America’s fastest-growing startups began making anxious phone calls. They believed that CEO Vishal Garg—a volatile entrepreneur with a history of disgruntled business partners—had been giving huge amounts of equity to one of his most loyal lieutenants, in a way that violated norms and seemed to defy explanation.

Those employees may have been right.

New public filings, interviews with high-ranking company officials, and internal documents reviewed by The Daily Beast reveal that the executive, Elana Knoller, was given stock options potentially worth tens of millions of dollars. Unlike normal employee packages, it vested immediately. It isn’t clear how much the board knew in advance.

She also received at least $8,000 per month for two homes, including one in Puerto Rico, and other perks. It does not appear that any other executive got a comparable deal at the firm, a SoftBank-backed mortgage lender called Better.com, which is about to go public via a SPAC at a massive $7.7 billion valuation.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidjeans/2020/11/20/mortgages-fraud-claims-and-dumb-dolphins-a-tangled-past-haunts-bettercom-ceo-vishal-garg/

“HELLO — WAKE UP BETTER TEAM,” writes Vishal Garg, the CEO of Better.com, in an email to employees obtained by Forbes. “You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS and…DUMB DOLPHINS get caught in nets and eaten by sharks. SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.”

Born in India, Garg moved with his family to Queens when he was seven. Early on, he displayed both intellect and entrepreneurialism. As a student at Manhattan’s academically competitive Stuyvesant High School, he bought CliffsNotes and books, and then sold them to students at a markup.

“My superpower, I think, I was good at math and good at, like, being able to spot an opportunity,” Garg said in a podcast last year. Another high school venture, he told the interviewer, was buying clothes at thrift stores and reselling them for a profit on eBay. (A Better spokesperson, however, said that wasn’t true as eBay wasn’t founded until after Garg left high school.)

... Khan says he was drawn to Garg’s ambition, and recalls spending nights discussing philosophy with him at tea houses on the Lower East Side. Though they were close friends, he says their philosophies didn’t always align. “People lie all the time, we should do it more often,” Khan remembers Garg saying in 2001. “I thought he was kidding. But I think part of him, in every joke there may be a little bit of truth."

[Bernardo de La Paz]

9. He harangued with "You are embarrassing me". All about HIM. He's a narcissistic sociopath. . nt

[discntnt_irny_srcsm]

12. Sociopath is on the money.

Probably an overt narcissist with a grandeur complex.

[Corgigal]

4. Too late.

For a company to be this tone deaf, near the holidays, tells you a lot.

He owns the decision, yeah. Always helpful when trying to put some gifts under the tree from Santa.

[DENVERPOPS]

15. Back in the day

it was a cardinal sin for a corporation or company to lay off or fire people before Christmas...........

Forty Five years ago, I left my job as an exec in a fortune 400 company........I could not stomach how the corporations treated their customers and employees. I quit my corporate career and did something entirely different... There are tons of upper executives and CEO's that have found a "socially acceptable" way to use their psychopathic personality and not be in prison........

I am sure that it is far worse now................

I remember all the corporate types saying that this country would run a lot better if it were run like a corporation. I would just shake my head........And here we are, them basically having turned most of the Gov't into a giant corporation......They have almost completed the takeover. Trust me, they won't make the same mistakes again that they made on 1/6.
They are a millimeter away from "installing" their Corporate Fascist Tyranny............

The 1/10th of one percent will stop at nothing now that they are at the threshold of their life time wet dream......

WASF

[Corgigal]

17. My husband and I

say to each other, they are going to steal us blind. The scared white people are gonna find out, they will steal what you have too.

Since my hubby gets a pension from other state, I worry that the state government says, ok you must live in state to get full funds. Or you’re only allowed to collect for so many years. I just make up random reasons, it doesn’t matter.

Like what Putin did with their Social Security in Russia, just changed the age.

Thank you for being human. We need more of us.

[DENVERPOPS]

18. George Orwell warned us in his book: 1984 (Written at the end of the 1940's)

That we should fear the government. He should have warned us to worry about a government that is taken over by Corporations....

I think the Trump years actually reminded me more of Orwell's book: Animal Farm. I swear it was a guideline for the Trump Admin and Republican Party......

If I had a zillion dollars, I fantasized about mailing a copy of Animal Farm to every address in the U.S. It was written so any third grader could understand it, unlike 1984..........

He wrote Animal Farm 5? years before 1984...........

[dalton99a]

5. Garg also intimated that remaining employees should look over their shoulders lest he chop them next

In a subsequent video call with Better’s remaining staffers, and in statements posted to the anonymous social media site Blind, Garg assailed the employees he had just fired, claiming that many had worked just two hours per day on average.

“They were stealing from you and stealing from our customers... Get educated,” he said, in comments previously published by Fortune.

Multiple sources say that, in truth, some of the laid-off workers had been top performers.

Garg also intimated that remaining employees should look over their shoulders, lest he chop them next. "If you felt in the past that people weren't looking,” he said, “everyone is looking now.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/bettercom-executives-flee-after-ceo-vishal-gargs-viral-self-own

[lark]

6. Right thing to do, very wrong way to do it! n/t

[mahannah]

8. Sorry only because of "uproar".

[PatrickforB]

10. Vishal Garg's net worth is around $4 billion. Just another parasite.

Billionaires are parasites on the rest of us, and every one represents a FAILURE in tax policy.

Because you can bet this greed-head sociopath makes hundreds of times the amount the people he fired on Zoom USED TO MAKE.

What a piece of excrement.

[7wo7rees]

16. Sociopaths make the best capitalists, don't they?

[turbinetree]

11. Seriously ....

company valued at 7 billion.........and then he added this bs

Garg said in his apology he would “talk more” at an all-staff company meeting, adding that Better.com’s goals for 2022 were “the metrics that matter most”.

The message ended with: “I believe in you, I believe in Better, and I believe that working together we can make home ownership better together.”


it's about greed, that is the metrics.....

[FakeNoose]

13. Aw ... how sweet of him

Bless his little heart. I hope his company tanks.

[getagrip_already]

14. it wouldn't matter.....

His wealth isn't in the company at this point. Once it goes public, he will cash out whatever he gets in stock (though most will be in cash no doubt) and find another mark.