Drops a nuke on their stock
"Well, guess my work is done. I'll take my $400 million golden parachute and just step over the pieces of my broken company as I shuffle out to my car. Peace, bro."
Then 6 months later gets a VP job somewhere else because he "has experience" all the while eyeing another run at CEO.
Nah once they're CEOs they're good. They just go sit on various boards making millions for doing relatively nothing.
“I just voted to keep employee pay low. Now I have to go fly my private jet around to justify the cost of owning it. Bye!”
I thought VPs already didn't really do anything, but being on the board and meeting 2 or 3 times a year is definitely less.
Someone find out if he or his family sold stock before the drop.
I've heard he sold some stock but it was like a recurring sell-this-much-every-this-often type of thing so it wasn't out of the ordinary is what I heard.
Pisses me off that CEOs never get fired for their bullshit and get to "retire" or "resign" like they didn't just make the most boneheaded decision that severely hurt the company.
There really needs to be some organizational structure where the CEOs have the power to make the decisions they make, but the employees have the power to punish and fire them when they do shit like this. No golden parachutes for them!
This is actually wrong. There's a near 100% chance that the decision was made by the board, and also the decision to remove the CEO. So we're talking about the fall guy, but being an insider, the fall guy will get a tidy sum for the dive
Then the CEO can be recycled to some other project, and a new CEO instated at Unity, so they can pivot or double down with no moral dilemma. In reality, the board was there all along and it's all a big PR game
Also if we're talking about avoiding responsibility cause of privilege then the boards of companies are the topic.
The C suite are just managers, usually wealthy from their own career rather than heritage. Board people are almost all old wealth, a parasitic race of nepo babies who ruin everything.
You're saying the workers should own the means of production. Sounds fair to me.
Pisses me off that CEOs never get fired for their bullshit and get to "retire" or "resign" like they didn't just make the most boneheaded decision that severely hurt the company.
They're rich people and it's not considered acceptable to hold rich people accountable in even the most trivial way.
CEOs are beholden to the shareholders, not the employees
Employees should be automatic shareholders. Ought to be a workers right by default to receive some portion of the equity they're producing.
Edit: And to be clear, shareholders win too. More companies should voluntarily structure themselves to grant shareholder rights to employees. Dumbass company ending mistakes are usually seen a long way off by line and rank employees.
But it should also be legally mandated structure, much like 401k rules exist now. I propose that all players involved are better off with such a rule, other than the (not currently rare) asshole CEOs who only want to pump and dump their stock.
Whoa get those perverted thoughts out of here commie scum!
It's actually pretty common to provide employees with stock options. But depending on the situation, it can be a better deal for the company than the employees. For the company, equity is a relatively cheap way to "motivate" employees. For the employees, it goes against the principle of portfolio diversification: if the company does badly, not only is their regular income threatened, but so are their assets.
Former EA CEO will be replaced in interim by James Whitehurst from IBM/Red Hat.
Is that better or worse?
I swear they treat CEO's who tank companies like they do priests who molest kids and just send them to another place whenever they get caught.
Tell me again why these hacks get paid so much for "taking risks" when they never end up being fired? I have not seen a single CEO officially fired from a company for driving it into the ground. They always "choose" to retire after fucking up the entire thing and collect a fat paycheck for doing so.
He's been told to retire or be fired.
Being actually fired is not at all good for his CV at that level, hence he is leaving by "retiring", a different process in legal terms.
That said, anybody with any experience with high-level management knows that a manager "retiring" after having made the kind of the decision this one did with the consequences it had, actually means he's been pushed out, just not through the formal process of "firing".
that's why I put the "choose" into air quotes. It's bs, anybody with a bit of info about the matter knows it but he still gets to cash out his boni because he has not been technically fired for crashing the company's future
Once you slightly climb the career ladder, vocabulary turns into marketing bs. Suddenly you most not say "problem" anymore. They're "opportunities" or "challenges". So at that level you don't get "fired" because that would sound bad for the next company you're going with. You're looking for new challenges elsewhere. Leaving behind a dumpster fire like in this very case.
when they never end up being fired
When you're a career professional, this is what being fired looks like.
"Choosing to retire" is face-saving language for "is being asked to step down," which is sort of like the police asking you to turn yourself in. You can choose not to, but you're still getting arrested either way
They treated a game engine company like a Silicon Valley startup. It's a limited customer base. It was never going to scale. Dummies.
No way, bro, we just gotta get each user to pay, bro. Have them pay a monthly fee to us to play games, bro. It’ll totally scale, bro.
It's a start.
Now do the Board who chose an EA CEO with his track record to lead Unity and stood behind this until finally forced by the consequences of his actions to push them out.
Certainly and after what happenned, merelly pushing out one guy in the nicest, most career protecting way possible, isn't sufficient to restore my trust in Unity as a platform on top of which to base my business.
I'm excited to know where that money hungry pos is going next 🤔
Judging by those eyes alone, I'd say he's going back to the collection of dismembered prostitutes in his basement.
Is that.. the guy from EA?
This explains lot!
Too late, I wouldn't trust Unity from this point on. Spend tons of time and effort only to have it all yanked away. Screw that!
Urrespective of all the other BS, why was the CEO also president of the board?
The role of the board is to supervise the executives.
That's not exactly an uncommon structure. In case you're just realizing this now: rich people are a bunch of corrupt fuckers.
Unity is dead, but at least one guy made it out like a bandit.
pops the golden parachute
"Later, bitches!"
"So, board of directors, you can force me to do any dumb thing you want, or fire me for not doing it? Yeah. Imma need an escape shuttle."
"Fine. We'll cut you a check for a couple of million if it comes to that. But we're so smart, it won't come to that."
"It came to that."
"Here's your check."
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Wow he only had to tank the company before his 50m worth of EA ownership became a problem...
Do not let the door hit you on the way out.
Why do we call it "retiring" when we all know he'll be CEO of some other company in 2 months?
Good riddance, but idk if this is a case of too little too late
inb4 he gets a job at fucking blackstone inc or something lmao
Yeah, after burning down something popular, he get off without any repercussions (aside maybe a big bag of cash) and is likely to go find the next successful thing to burn it down, to get another big bag of cash.
Can we purge these people out once they failed everywhere?
He didn't fail. He did what the board asked of him which proved to be more unpopular than they all had expected. So they gave him an obscenely generous severance package and sent him on his merry way.
He's been rewarded and they're just trying to position it so it looks like the company leadership gives a shit and won't try the exact same thing at a later date.
Out with the old guy and in with the new guy. No change to the incentive structure. I wonder if things will turn out differently this time?
I hope Unity users will get to continue to use the tool they have spent so many hours learning. I also think the industry should try to make things more CEO proof.
The problem is making it more shareholder proof. Enshittification comes from the line go up mandate. Unity is but a single example.
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