Better laid off 900 employees with a leaked Zoom call, where the CEO said they were stealing from customers by being lazy.
For some examples of large layoffs, here are a few.
- IBM-60,000 people in 1993
- Citigroup-50,000 people in 2008
- Sears-50,000 people in 1993
- GM-47,000 people in 2009
- AT&T-40,000 people in 1996
Those are the biggest layoffs in modern times and all related to companies with internal issues, if not full on recessions to deal with.
Each one of those companies did have leaders which cited struggle in the company, the economy or something external.
This is the first time I could find in recent history, a CEO would knockout almost 10% of his staff and blame them for it.
Especially when looking at the company, financials aren’t very good.
They lost 86 million dollars in the second quarter of 2021.
The revenue for that quarter was reported at 172 million, meaning they ran a 50% loss to revenue.
The layoffs are clearly a result of losses and wanting to balance out sheets, but it actually gets sketchier from there.
Better announced in May that they planned to go public, but not through a traditional IPO.
They were going to merge with an existing publicly traded company based in the Cayman Islands called Aurora Acquisition Corp, which has only a 300 million dollar market cap, but the merger would launch them at a desired valuation of 7.7 billion.
The reason for this is there’s a lot less paperwork required over a traditional IPO and financial disclosures aren’t as needed.
Meaning Better is running 50% losses, is planning a sketchy IPO alternative and 8 years into the companies existence, they are just a mortgage provider that has taken the 905 million in disclosed VC funds raised to fund mortgages at a loss to gain a customer base.
The company clearly is in fault and the idea the CEO would during the holiday season layoff 900 people and blame them is pretty disgusting.