No one asked why he did it. The common thread was "he was greedy!"
That really pisses me off. We come to find out a week later that the company was days away from total insolvency and that structuring an ABC to deal with $40 million of debt was the only way to keep anyone's jobs. It's a brutally painful place to be.
Sometimes people do awful things for simple and awful reasons. But I believe that's rare. I believe some people are forced to do awful things that they would never otherwise do given the option. I think in this case people didn't want to know, or perhaps didn't care to know why it happened. They just wanted to blame someone.
I fear the media's growing lack of interest in the why.
$50k split between all the people who made this decision is a trivial amount of money compared to their salaries and bonuses.
What if he did NOT profit? What if he lost millions of his own personal net worth? Would you consider him the opposite of a bastard?
There are very few instances where a company takes a complete header like this and the CEO gets paid handsomely. And how can you compare being in $40 million of cash debt and putting the company to ABC against selling a company in an acquisition?
This is the essence of many of the problems in our lives.
When somebody does something awful, usually there is a reason other than that they are a 'bad person', there are complex reasons, maybe wrong reasons, but there are reasons why they did what they did, and is important to understand those reasons before criticizing.
Some times an awful thing is the best you can do, because the alternatives are even worse. Those decisions are the most difficult and painful to make, and rarely anyone appreciates it.
That is a slippery slope and a possible excuse for loosing dignity.
Side note: Wonder just how low my karma will sink after this post and my original one lol. Seems like people don't agree with me, which is fine :)
But You know, it's possible - I mean redemption is also possible. Even among CEO's. ;)
Looks like a bit of poor cash flow management - mixed with some unfortunate acquisition manoeuvres lead OnLive to this rather nasty juncture (Sony's Gaiki acquisition - inability to monetize - inability to sign up profitably - too much scale too fast).
OnLive is still a great idea - and as John Carmack has stated (paraphrased):
> "Cloud gaming is a technical inevitability. It will happen within the next 5 years."
And someone is still going to make a lot of money. I'm still betting it'll be Perlman and his team.
In the case of my own health insurance outside the US, I could pay the premiums for about 11 years.
As a sidenote, living in a country where health insurance is mandatory and not linked to having a job, I am always shocked that Americans loss job and health insurance if they get fired. Isn't the getting fired bad enough, especially in today's economy?
The Affordable Healthcare Act (Obamacare) is trying to remedy this by creating the insurance exchanges and making everyone buy insurance. That should all be setup sometime in 2013 I think.
Until then, I'm staying in Germany where health care is actually affordable for self-employed people.
On the plus side, it looks like the employees here are eligible for COBRA, which lets you buy into your previous employee health plan for up to 18 months. That at least gives you a semi-fixed group rate that doesn't depend on preexisting conditions. The regulated health insurance exchanges that should be opening by January 1, 2014 under the new healthcare reform will also (if all goes well) make things much better, albeit still much more complex and bureaucratic than necessary (living in Denmark now and contemplating moving back to the U.S., I'm not looking forward to the huge increase in healthcare complexity).
Much longer for an individual, and about 5 times longer for family insurance if you are willing to have a deductible.
