CEO Vishal Garg, 43, landed himself in hot water this week as he fired 9 per cent of his workforce on a Zoom call.  Garg is CEO of Better.com, an online mortgage lender.  The CEO was blunt with the employees, saying  ‘This isn’t news that you’re going to want to hear…If you’re on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off. Your employment here is terminated effective immediately.’

A disgruntled employee filmed the Zoom call, cursing at Garg after it was revealed that he was one of the 900 people terminated.  ‘F**k you dude. Are you f**king kidding me?’  The employee can be heard saying during the Zoom call.

 

 

Garg later doubled down on the firings, which included Better.com’s entire diversity and equity team, saying they were necessary due to market fluctuations and that many of the employees fired were lazy and unproductive.  “You guys know that at least 250 of the people terminated were working an average of 2 hours a day while clocking 8 hours+ a day in the payroll system?” he wrote on professional network Blind.

‘They were stealing from you and stealing from our customers who pay the bills that pay our bills. Get educated”  He added.

Garg made the comments under the anonymous username ‘uneducated’ but later confirmed in a Fortune interview that he was the one who made them.

Garg is no stranger to controversy.   In a deposition in 2019, he told a former business partner—once the best man at his wedding—that he was “going to staple him against a f*cking wall and burn him alive.” (Garg later apologized.)

Garg’s company has faced accusations of fraud and that he may have ‘misappropriated’ tens of millions of dollars from other businesses.