CEO Vishal Garg just pulled a power move that has left a lot of people confused and a lot of people unemployed. Garg, who is CEO of mortgage lender Better.com just took to a Zoom call and used that opportunity to fire 900 employees at once, citing them as being so lazy and implying that they were costing him more money than they were making him.
Anyone who is familiar with Garg’s name knows this is by no means the first time he has done something extreme, though this may be his most extreme action so far. Outside of that time he threatened to burn a coworker alive, that is.
Mass Firing Just Weeks Before Christmas
Imagine getting told you need to pop on a Zoom call with your boss (and close to a thousand other employees), and you get on the call only to be told:
“If you are on this call, your employment here is terminated.”
As you can assume, most of the employees on the call were in genuine shock. Not only because it was unexpected, but also because the company just got a $750 million dollar cash infusion shortly beforehand from backers of Better.com. So an act that should’ve secured their job ends up costing them it.
A Modern Day Scrooge
And Garg’s reasoning for the mass layoffs was quite pointed, citing workers who claim to be on the clock for eight hours only logging in for two hours of actual work, which he claims is costing him more than they make. But Garg also addressed how this wasn’t easy for him either, as he had done it before. Via The Daily Mail:
“This is the second time in my career I’m doing this and I do not want to do this. The last time I did it, I cried. This time, I hope to be stronger. We are laying off about 15% of the company for a number of reasons — the market, efficiency and performances and productivity.”
No Stranger to Controversy
Garg actually has quite a storied background in terms of how he treats people. In an interview with Fortune, he even talked openly about wanting to murder a coworker. Saying he would “staple him to a wall and f*cking burn him alive.” There have also been numerous example of him being rude and straight up cruel on his Slack forum he shares with his employees.
But in regards to the layoffs, he had also spoken of the fact that the firm had to start reviewing employees because all the numbers weren’t adding up. “As we started to slow down our pace of hiring, we saw some alarming statistics and a number of our customers were not getting the service that they deserved from our teammates.”
With that information in hand, he reacted swiftly.
What About the Unemployed?
The 900 staff being let go were obviously in shock, and you could even hear some of his workers cussing at him in the leaked video.
Not only is it a mass firing, but a mass firing from a man with a reputation for such things, but it was happening a mere three weeks before Christmas, without warning, while the world is still recovering from a pandemic. It is a financial hit your average person would have genuine trouble recovering from in 2021.
Meanwhile, Better.com is now evaluated to be worth almost eight billion dollars.
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