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Larry Ellison Rips HP Board a New One
theodp writes "No stranger himself to sexual harassment allegations, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has denounced HP's directors for forcing the resignation of HP CEO Mark Hurd. 'The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago,' Ellison wrote. For now, it seems that Rupert Murdoch is also standing by Hurd, who sits on News Corp's Board of Directors and its Corporate Governance Committee. Less likely to survive the scandal is Hurd's relationship with HP General Counsel Mike Holston, who accepted Hurd's signed separation agreement after leading an investigation into Hurd's actions, which Holston told the NY Times 'showed a profound lack of judgment.' Quite a change from just last year, when Hurd and Holston teamed up to get their daughters' elite prep school a state-of-the-art HP Data Center."
According to one of my old classmates who works at HP, they've either been keeping everything really quiet, or there is no evidence. He is betting on the latter. This may just be a case of slander/libel. It does not take much for a woman to accuse a man of a crime that he did not commit and get him into heaps of trouble for it.
Happened to me in the 90s and on a much smaller scale. I was accused of groping a woman, and when the cop arrived, she couldn't even keep her story straight. The cop tried to convince her how to best make up her story in front of my face. I was arrested. When we went to court, I provided microcassette audio and a transcript of what had happened. Cop was fired, and they tried the woman for perjury. Still made my life a nightmare.
Really, is anyone surprised that this is Larry Ellison's reaction? (Regardless of the actual details of the allegations or truth of them.)
He's the kind of guy (the bit about him in the Washington Post article linked in TFA speaks to this somewhat, if you're not familiar) who thinks of executives as a kind of new aristocracy, able to do whatever they want and sleep with whichever female employees they want without limit or accountability.
People rag on the quirks tech CEOs like Ballmer and Jobs (and some of it's deserved and/or funny), but Ellison is a honest-to-god king of the douchebags.