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Skype Execs Purged On Eve of MS Takeover

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the out-with-the-old dept.

jfruhlinger writes "You might think that the executive team that engineered a lucrative buyout for their company would be rewarded. But eight execs from Skype instead found themselves fired just before their company was formally taken over by Microsoft. It appears that this move isn't meddling from Redmond; rather, the private equity firm that owns a 70 percent stake in Skype wanted to cut back on the payout to company execs that would normally accompany this kind of transaction."

6 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. The invisible hand of captialism by Pope · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Always seems to be carrying a very sharp sword.

    --
    It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
  2. when the victims of corporate psychopaths by circletimessquare · · Score: 5, Insightful

    are other corporate psychopaths, it's hard to feel sympathy

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
    1. Re:when the victims of corporate psychopaths by DontBlameCanada · · Score: 5, Interesting

      IMHO, the only thing worse than execs of of a corp getting paid off at the expense of employees during a take over, is when a nameless venture cap org does.

      We don't know the whole story, but if venture cap nuked execs (that might possibly have been instrumental in making the company successful) to increase their own take, that is *WORSE*.

  3. Shed no tears for them. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Informative
    These guys are big fish, swimming with the sharks. For example Gurle joined in Jan 2010. Just 18 months with the company. All the fired ones seem to be the MBA types who move in just to dress the company up for sale or IPO. Not the founders and early grunts who toil in garages and warehouses during the very early days living on pizza, sleeping in the office, desperately churning out code on a shoe string budget, not knowing if they can make pay roll next month.

    These suits ate little fish in their time. They got eaten by bigger fish. They will again start eating little fish once again. Just stay out of their jaws, if you can.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  4. mergers are statistically bad for everyone by smoothnorman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A wise old CEO wheezed unto me: "A merger is a risk to everyone except one of the two CEOs - to everyone else it is a danger". Mergers reduce competition, so the market loses; mergers cost stockholders, at least in the short-run; mergers are engines of redundancy so it's a threat to all the employees. The only possible virtual gain is an investors' promise of less competition in the marketplace. Almost everyone loses. So the next time you read: "Massive-corp to buy out Macro-corp!" try not to cheer for the two original owners who get their one-time lottery prize, but instead pause in lament for the majority and progress in general.

  5. Re:Ah, but I wanted to blame Microsoft by captain_sweatpants · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You must not have noticed the reference to them being executives.