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Comment by leke | Hacker News Reader

2nd time I'm saying this...2023 is the year of the greedy CEO.

Unity has lost $455 million dollars in the first 6 months of the fiscal year 2023. They lost $919 million in 2022. I don't think they have ever made a profit. Companies are not charities; they exist to make money, and Unity doesn't by a mile.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1810806/000181080623...

Post-IPO unity may not have made a profit (although that link of yours shows positive EBITDA in recent quarters), but they only went public in 2020.

So what? They're doing classic bait & switch.

The fact that they weren't profitable just makes it even more pathetic.

This is the key. Companies that lose money are unreliable long-term partners.

> Companies are not charities; they exist to make money

Funny you're saying that when so many US companies are losing billions if dollars and viewed as successful :)

How do you lose that much money? How does Unity Technologies employ 7700 people?!

For comparison: Epic Games employs about 3700 people. That includes the people working on Fortnite and the Epic Games store.

Edit: the stats might be a bit questionable though.

It sounds like Unity needs to learn some personal responsibility. Why should they get a hand out at our expense? /s

Seriously though, that is an insane number of employees. It sounds like another case of poor leadership that thought there'd be free money forever.

There's a big chunk of "technically unity" that used to be Weta.

According to Wilipedia only 275 employees became part of Unity theough this acquisition.

It's not CEO's doing something wrong. It's workers.

Try "year of the submissive worker" maybe "year of the dominated worker" and see how that tastes in your mouth.

It's workers lack of unionization and enforced professional ethics that means there are no consequences for being "greedy" and that being "greedy" is in fact a winning strategy in the game of prisoners dilemma.

It's convenient when someone else is doing something wrong and they need to change, but if you want change, you need to look in the mirror and ask what you are doing wrong and for most of us, that is failing to unionize in order to get a seat at the negotiating table and therefore being able to check otherwise unchecked CEO/Board power.

Wage is a measurement of power, not value. Wage is capped by value provided, but scales with power.

This is a very hostile way to phrase a pro-union argument, and I can't actually see how it would help here.

> Wage is capped by value provided, but scales with power.

Did you mean: "Wage scales with value provided, but is capped by power". It seems to make more sense to me.

Every year is the year of the greedy CEO.

You're saying they weren't greedy in 2022? What changed?

Interest rates and the cost of rolling over debt, likely.

It has been interesting and fun to watch what one simple knob turn of interest rates to more reasonable numbers does.

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