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Comment by markokocic | Hacker News Reader

Not a good move. He started his job by doing some hard upfront decisions that he hoped will play in HP advantage in the long run. And the board cut him off at the point when he didn't even started the transformation. Now, who knows what will happen.

The other possible explanation is that he knew that he is going to be scraped, and had enormous compensation for receiving the blame.

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His total earnings from these 11 months seems to be $35 million. $9.8M in salary, signing bonus, etc, and $25.2M severence in cash and stock.

source: http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/22/technology/hp_leo_apotheker_...

Nice work if you can get it.

I figured he'd be well compensated, but wouldn't this mark the end of his career as a high level executive?

Carly drove the company into the ground too and doesn't seem to have trouble finding work even now.

For better or for worse, I don't think Apotheker will have trouble finding another company to run.

I like your second explanation.

A cynical person would surmise that HP knowingly hired Apotheker to be a sacrificial lamb. A lamb that would make a few unpopular board-supported decisions (to the public and stockholders) yet leave the board's hands clean once that lamb was fired.

> sacrificial lamb

Scapegoat, in the vernacular. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating : a she-goat with a silver bracelet hung from her neck was driven forth into the wasteland ...

They'll make it gold, and probably spare the sex change ...

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