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Comment by azundo | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it weirder if he kept the mansion? Perhaps he might not have been able to pay the mortgage anymore so he sold it? It's a bit shocking how tone deaf the the Instagram posts are though. Not really excusable when you're totally ghosting your company.

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Again, how the CEO manages thier personal finances is really no concern and irrelevant to the conversation as long as there was nothing improper with the company's payment arrangement with the CEO.

It really sounds like this CEO just checked out. Sounds like the board should have stepped in and either replaced him for being an ineffective steward of the company. Which just goes to show that the CEO has fault, but there are others that were asleep at the wheel as well.

Except the reason the CEO got rich enough to afford a mansion and a boat is because he accumulated for his personal use the value created by his employees. That alone is reason to ask, "is this really fair?"

Fair? It's a corporation. CEOs get paid significantly more than employees. It is a fact of life. You do not have to continue employement at a company if you think the pay scale is not fair. Good luck finding a job where you think things are fair. When you do find that job, please, make a Show HN so that others might be able to leave their unfair situations.

I guess if you assume the structure and systems of 21st century capitalism are "a fact of life", like breathing and reproduction, you could make the argument that it's OK.

CEOs of publicly traded companies, where a significant chunk of their compensation is stock which can be sold on an open market, sure but not all CEOs.

In my entire career the highest paid people in a private company (including multiple high growth B2B startups) has always been the top sales people. Not the sales manager, not the CEO, an individual contributor Sales person. As you hit more and more above quota, accelerators kick in where you commission percentage increases massively. And our CEO loves writing them those checks because good sales people way more than pay for themselves.

Do you have a source saying his $1.8m mansion (his purchase price) was from the value created by his employees? $1.8m homes are certainly expensive, but clearly the board approved his salary and they were the ones primarily funding it, not the employees.

The boat may of been bought from the appreciation of the home.

> Do you have a source?

I mean.. that's capitalism? Capital accumulation is the bedrock of the system.

You should've asked that question when you joined the company and learnt that he had a mansion. Of course you didn't because it's based on a stupid premise that people should be paid based on your perception of fairness.

As opposed to the premise that people be paid based on who they know and how much money their family accumulated before they were born?

no shit Sherlock, what are you gonna do about it? Write another comment on hacker news?

But he wasn't just CEO; he was founder and probably still a significant stock holder. While all the shareholders bear some culpability, either:

a. having enough capital in the business to pay severance, or, b. firing people at the point before they stopped being able to avoid severance.

... are both better options than he should have taken.

Severance, in the US, is not a given and is not a mandated thing. If a company is in financial distress, why does it seem that money to pay severance is magically available when they don't have the money to pay wages? Are you suggesting the writing on the wall should have been seen earlier so that they could have made the decision to dismiss the employees while the bank account was flush enough to cover severance?

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