> Carson enjoys a climate-related disaster
These people will never experience happiness and high morale
I get it. People are pissed off about not having a job and the no severance is just salt in the wound. Lashing out at the CEO is obvious and justifiable. Stretching that ire into the CEOs personal finance is not serving the cause in a meaningful way. Absolutely, bitch&moan about his Insta posts. Bitch&moan about the fact the CEO wasn't willing to sacrifice some salary as a gesture to offset. Lots of examples of how badly this CEO handled this. Definitely will not look good in his future CEO job interviews.
When you're buying a boat and spending all your time sailing as you are supposed to be putting together a deal to save the company, and then that deal falls through, people are going to wonder if maybe there was more you could have done if you hadn't been buying boats and playing.
This putz was too cowardly to lead honestly, and too incompetent to get a deal done to protect the livelihood of his team. If he knew he was checked out, he could have explored restructuring and letting the team buy in, maybe allowed them to reach out to their network and replace him. Instead all those hours of effort were reduced to nothing while he ran away from his responsibilities.
Fuck people like that, and fuck their boats and their Instagram feeds. They steal time away from our families for no benefit to us our society at large.
If you as a CEO feel burnt out etc and can't be bothered anymore to run the company and can't find a buyer, but the folks who joined your company are still invested because they believe in the vision, then let them buy the company from you. I'm sure some arrangement could have been made, even if you're not getting the millions you were expecting.
At least you'd protect your personal brand when you go and do your next venture.
But the way Ryan handled this is really poor - especially those sailing boat shots, while his employees had to worry about finding the next job.
Poor leadership and he totally burnt his personal brand imo.
Edit: typos / clarity
Live in modest house and give the people who sacrificed for you like a week of severance or something. Anything.
What the attempts at building a norm along the lines of, "It isn't a crime, so people shouldn't talk about his finances" is about attempting to keep people from noticing that is almost always the case. It is class-defense, and what won't look good in future CEO interviews is that he was gauche-enough to draw attention to the difference between incentives-in-theory and the real world.