Better.com confirmed to The Tennessee Star Monday that it did indeed fire 900 employees on a recent Zoom call.
“If you’re on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off,” CEO Vishal Garg said on the call. “Your employment here is terminated effective immediately.”
“It’s been a really, really challenging decision to make,” Garg continued. “This is the second time in my career that I’m doing this, and I do not want to do this. The last time I did it, I cried. I hope this time to be stronger. But we are laying off about 15 percent of the company.
He cited “market efficiencies and performance, and productivity” as the reason for the terminations.
The Zoom meeting was recorded by one of the employees who was fired, and who reacted with exasperation as Garg made the announcement.
Better is a mortgage, real estate, title, and home insurance company which operates completely online.
“Having to conduct layoffs is gut wrenching, especially this time of year, however a fortress balance sheet and a reduced and focused workforce together set us up to play offense going into a radically evolving homeownership market,” Better’s CFO Kevin Ryan originally told CNN Business.
That same statement was relayed to The Star.
KABC reported that among those fired were the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion recruiting staffers, though Better did not immediately confirm that report for The Star.
Garg has a reputation as a colorful CEO.
He once slammed his own employees in an anonymous post on the professional review network Blind.
“You guys know that at least 250 of the people terminated were working an average of 2 hours a day while clocking 8 hours+ a day in the payroll system?” he wrote.
“They were stealing from you and stealing from our customers who pay the bills that pay our bills. Get educated,” he also said on the platform.
The authenticity of that post was confirmed by Fortune.
According to Forbes, he once railed on his office managers for not keeping the refrigerators stocked with Fiji and Perrier water.
Last year, he also compared his employees’ intelligence level to that of dolphins.
‘You are TOO DAMN SLOW,” he reportedly said in an email. “You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS and…DUMB DOLPHINS get caught in nets and eaten by sharks. SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.”
Garg also survived a scandal in which he gave special treatment in the form of perks to one of his closest executives, Elana Knoller. Those perks included rent money for two homes, one of which was in Puerto Rico, and stock options worth potentially tens of millions of dollars that vested immediately, unlike the stock options given to other employees.
Knoller was later placed on administrative leave for bullying.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a contributor at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Hope TN didn’t give them any jobs credits
Working 2hrs a day while clocking an 8+ hour paycheck? I don’t care how big of a butthole you are, a company can’t survive like that. Hopefully middle management were apart of this group who got fired because they are the one’s responsible for employee oversight.