In October 2016, John Stumpf retired as CEO of Wells Fargo. He didn’t get a severance package because he’d presided over a banking scandal involving Wells Fargo’s creation of millions of phony bank accounts.
Despite this, Stumpf walked away with 2.5 million shares of Wells Fargo stock, valued in February 2017 at $137 million. And though the Wells Fargo board decided to claw back about $69 million of that, we don’t figure Stumpf will be forced to pick up fares for Uber to make ends meet.
More recently comes the example of Adam Neumann, the co-founder and former chief of WeWork who resigned in September after a group of investors sounded the alarm about increasing company losses ($1.25 billion in the third quarter alone).
The real estate office-sharing startup, valued at $47 billion before a planned but aborted initial public offering, is now worth less than $6 billion.
But Neumann, who once declared that he’d like to live forever and be the “president of the world,” received an exit package valued at $1.7 billion. Meanwhile, thousands of WeWork employees won’t be — working, that is, as layoffs of 30% of the company’s workforce of 14,000 are expected.
And earlier this month, McDonald’s fired CEO Steve Easterbrook because he had a consensual relationship with an employee, a violation of company policy. His exit package is worth almost $42 million. That’s in addition to $23.8 million in stock options.
Closer to home is Razorback football coach Chad Morris, who compiled a 4-18 record, the worst 22-game interval in Razorback football history. Nevertheless, his contract calls for him to get more than $10.1 million from the University of Arkansas.
Don’t misunderstand us: We’re big on capitalism. But if this keeps up, people might start to think the system is rigged.
Sign up for Daily E-news
