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Shareholders Sue Alphabet's Board For Role In Allegedly Covering Up Sexual Misconduct By Senior Execs (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Attorneys in San Francisco representing an Alphabet shareholder are suing the board of directors for allegedly covering up sexual misconduct claims against top executives. The suit comes months after an explosive New York Times report detailed how Google shielded executives accused of sexual misconduct, either by keeping them on staff or allowing them amicable departures. For example, Google reportedly paid Android leader Andy Rubin a $90 million exit package, despite asking for his resignation after finding sexual misconduct claims against him credible.
The new lawsuit, filed in California's San Mateo County, asserts claims for breach of fiduciary duty, abuse of control, unjust enrichment, and waste of corporate assets. The attorneys say the lawsuit is the result of "an extensive original investigation into non-public evidence" and produced copies of internal Google minutes from board of directors meetings. "The Directors' wrongful conduct allowed the illegal conduct to proliferate and continue," the suit reads. "As such, members of Alphabet's Board were knowing and direct enablers of the sexual harassment and discrimination."
The new lawsuit, filed in California's San Mateo County, asserts claims for breach of fiduciary duty, abuse of control, unjust enrichment, and waste of corporate assets. The attorneys say the lawsuit is the result of "an extensive original investigation into non-public evidence" and produced copies of internal Google minutes from board of directors meetings. "The Directors' wrongful conduct allowed the illegal conduct to proliferate and continue," the suit reads. "As such, members of Alphabet's Board were knowing and direct enablers of the sexual harassment and discrimination."
You mean all this time people could sue over senior management committing "breach of fiduciary duty, abuse of control, unjust enrichment, and waste of corporate assets"?
For most of them that's the only reason they wanted those jobs in the first place.
Real afaik. In the case of Rubin he was getting sexual favors from a female under his supervision and she had trouble getting out of the situation. I know that during my time at Google both Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt had multiple extra-marital affairs with employees or contractors (guess how they got the contracts). Apparently Page also joined the club, because if everyone around him is doing it, why not him. Rubin was asked to leave the company because an employee started complaining about the situation, not because he was doing something illegal. Iâ(TM)m glad I left this sick company years ago, I was miserable then and would be miserable now if I had stayed.
"Do no evil"
As a low-level peon I fall to understand how this happens. How do you get a contract signed at hiring that says "if I leave or am fired for misconduct you must give me a parachute of $500,000"?
It's not that hard for the founders and early hires.
One of the risks of a startup is that, after you've worked for them a while, they get merged, and the new guys fire the old ones - often before their stock options have all vested. The employee loses the prize he helped create and the value reverts to the company and/or the new owners. There are lots of variations on this (internal shakeups and office politics, companies buying and killing their upstart competition, etc.)
This makes the potential employee leery. To get him to sign, the contract may have clauses to prevent that, such as immediate vesting if the company is acquired, an extra year's vesting if he's laid off or fired before his options vest, etc. If one company offers this and another doesn't, guess which he joins.
But if (as they often used to) the contract DOESN'T hand out the goodies if he's fired "for cause", it gives the employer an incentive to claim misconduct and hold on to the goodies by faking cause. Then the employee is not just out the goodies but also gets an undeserved black mark on his job history. Oops! So again, in the hire-the-good-talent race, contracts have evolved so there is either a no-fault get-the-goodies-when-canned clause, or the bad conduct exception has to be something like a provable major sin against the company.
Thus it's common to have contracts where, if somebody gets dumped because of an external accusation that makes them a bigger liability than their work makes them an asset, it may result in a dismissal with, not just all the benefits earned so far, but triggering a "we fired you early" bonus.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And then they try to virtue signal by firing that autistic guy for writing that naive memo...despicable.
apparently Silicon Valley and the Western world has to relearn the lessons all ancient cultures knew until the 20th century. Humans, at least normal humans are sexual creatures. You mix men and women, there will always be a very significant degree of inherent tension and drama as a result you can't get rid of. This tension and drama comes from the dynamics of intra and intersex competition and jockeying that is evolutionarily hardwired into us and is inherent for our survival. We've tried the 'humans are robots that can turn asexual at the flip of a switch' theory for decades or centuries if you count church, and it never works. Even at its strongest bastions (google and colleges) it backfires badly. Either you learn to live with this and stop taking every microaggression or flirt so seriously or you segregate the sexes and develop natural sex specific roles, like our forefathers have successful done for countless millennia.
Spot on. I managed to negotiate such a thing as employee #1. Still left on my own volition because things were turning to shit though. :-)
That may all be t rue. It makes me think however that the society where all these tricks are necessary is on a wrong path.
As a low-level peon I fall to understand how this happens. How do you get a contract signed at hiring that says "if I leave or am fired for misconduct you must give me a parachute of $500,000"?
In 2005, Google bought Android from Andy Rubin for 50 million dollars. Andy Rubin was at the helm of Android until December 2012 (basically, Android had already taken over the World by then).
In 2016, an Oracle lawyer leaked court documents that said that Google had made 22 billion dollars in profit from the Android operating system.
So you do the math.
Those "we fired you early" clauses are called "retention bonuses. They're also a form of "golden parachute".
Even in civil matters you still need preponderance of evidence.
We don't yet burn the witch on the say so of another.
Executives are capitalism's royalty, they live under special rules for the nobility rather than the iron law of wages like us peasants, it's that simple.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Joe Rogan Experience #1218 - Gad Saad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Every time Sergei was found out, the whole company got sent to Harassment training. HR couldn't send execs, but they could send the peons. One year it was 5 times.
As a low-level peon I fall to understand how this happens. How do you get a contract signed at hiring that says "if I leave or am fired for misconduct you must give me a parachute of $500,000"?
In 2005, Google bought Android from Andy Rubin for 50 million dollars. Andy Rubin was at the helm of Android until December 2012 (basically, Android had already taken over the World by then).
In 2016, an Oracle lawyer leaked court documents that said that Google had made 22 billion dollars in profit from the Android operating system.
So you do the math.
I don't see much of an issue with this.
$50 Million is enough money to live very comfortably. If it's possible to get 1% interest on it, that's half a million dollars per year without earning another dollar otherwise. $50 million may not be Walton money, but it's still far more than the majority of programmers will earn over the course of a career. Sure, he would probably end up keeping only $30M after taxes and lawyers, but it's still "never work again" money.
Now, the argument here is that it's 0.002% of what Google's gross revenue from the platform is, so he should have gotten more. Well, I'm not much of a Google fan, but to give credit where it's due, Android's install base rivals Windows (exceeds it, depending on how you count), but in 2005, there was no guarantee of anything. 2005 was pre-iPhone, pre-Chrome, tablets were $2,000, ran XP Tablet PC Edition and shipped with a stylus, and the smartphone market was a three horse race between Microsoft, Palm, and Blackberry. If the outcome of the mobile race had Microsoft and Android in reverse, Rubin could have walked away with $50M, and he could have been the only one to turn a profit.
Even if the argument is that he should make a percentage of the gross revenue, that's both tough to define and also brings into the picture Google's part in the development. For good or for ill, a nontrivial part of what makes Google so popular is the Google ecosystem. Rubin didn't develop Gmail, Maps, Chrome, Youtube, Wallet, or Assistant. Rubin didn't integrate Activesync or make a one-stop-shop market for apps, books, movies, music, or work out the licensing or distribution deals. Yet, an Android phone without these things certainly wouldn't have been as much of a competitor to iOS. Android 9, and the Google ecosystem it integrates, bears very little resemblance to the Android Google bought. Yes, it's $22 billion, but that averages out to $2 billion per year, which goes pretty quick if you use it to pay all the developers who have continued development on the OS, its first party apps, the backend ecosystems that make it work, and the ad infrastructure from whence that revenue came.
I really, really wish we didn't metaphorically burn the witch on the say so of another. It seems that this is still a popular path in today's society.
$50 Million is enough money to live very comfortably.
Andy Ruben didn't get the $50 million, his company did. He had to split it with the rest of the investors, workers, etc.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Wish I had know this. I was employee number one at a company and let go the day my patents were approved.