If things are so dire today that they have no money and must shutdown immediately, they were dead in the water 6-8 weeks ago anyways. The company isn’t going to be miraculously saved during that time, so just take the cash you used to pay your employees to rearrange chairs on the sinking ship, call it 2 months early, and pay out their severance/health care during that time while they look for new jobs.
The company can certainly be saved in a period of months. FedEx supposedly had less than a week of jet fuel opex remaining when the founder decided to try to win the missing money by gambling.
"It worked once" is a very results oriented approach.
If you look only at people who won the lottery, you'd have to be an idiot not to spend all your money on lottery tickets. How many times has someone done this and lost all their money, screwed over thousands of people, and never been heard of again? We don't know, because they aren't famous, but my suspicion is it's a much more common outcome.
Oh, let's not pat Fred Smith on the back for his grit and determination here.
FedEx was already shafting their pilots for months before this. Bounced paychecks, pilots paying for jet fuel on personal credit cards, and more.
If I was a pilot there, I'd have said "Fuck you, Fred", even though he won. How sociopathic do you have to be to gamble company money (sorry, isn't that a felony?) while bouncing paychecks?
And yet you'll still have people here applauding your hustler mentality, apparently.
> FedEx was already shafting their pilots for months before this. Bounced paychecks, pilots paying for jet fuel on personal credit cards, and more.
This is bad.
> How sociopathic do you have to be to gamble company money (sorry, isn't that a felony?) while bouncing paychecks?
It sounds like he was about to bounce a lot more paychecks. Going all or nothing instead isn't something I would call sociopathic. What makes you call it that?
Normally "gambling company money" implies embezzlement, which is not what happened here.
> Normally "gambling company money" implies embezzlement, which is not what happened here.
Huh, what?
"In one instance, after a crucial business loan was denied, he took the company's last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 gambling on blackjack to cover the company's $24,000 fuel bill."
"Embezzlement is the fraudulent taking of property by someone to whom it was entrusted, usually involving theft from a business or employer."
I mean I suppose you could try to make some argument that it was an officially sanctioned company act, but that's definitely some post facto rationalization.
"’The meeting with the General Dynamics board was a bust and I knew we needed money for Monday, so I took a plane to Las Vegas and won $27,000.’ I said, ‘You mean you took our last $5,000-- how could you do that?’ He shrugged his shoulders"
Sounds both unsanctioned and sociopathic to me.
And not Fred's first or last brush with financial malfeasance, indicted for forgery over a $2 million loan from his family's trust fund.
I'm inclined to think 'selfish' much more than 'plucky startup founder'.
Embezzlement as in, you bet the money and if it succeeds you pocket the excess. Or that you already stole money and you're desperately gambling company money to make it back and hide the theft.
This is not embezzlement. It's reckless, not theft.
> Sounds both unsanctioned and sociopathic to me.
Very unsanctioned, but I don't see how you get sociopathic from that quote.
Please explain what's sociopathic about it like I'm stupid.
The lack of funding is already there. This act shifts the odds but doesn't really make them worse. And if the company doesn't run out of money that seems like a good thing.
The first quote I saw here was that payroll was going to fail if he didn't do this. I don't think a guarantee of only paying half the employees is better than a 50% chance of paying everyone or paying no one, for example.
If this wasn't affecting payroll then sociopathy is even less of a worry.
Only if this was going to risk payroll with no benefit to payroll do I see a serious moral issue.
He took company funds and gambled them. That he won and was able to replace them is immaterial. Martin Shkreli was convicted for misusing company funds even though he made his investors money. It's not "not theft" because you can or do put the money back.
I can't understand how you can't see that.
That $5,000 ($40,000 in today's money) might not have gone very far, but you are very eager to whitewash it because he ended up winning on his gamble, and FedEx has gone on to success. He easily could have lost that bet, and that money could have reimbursed credit card bills for his employees. How that isn't reckless and malfeasance, I don't understand. "We're screwed. I can use the last of this money to try to do something right, or fuck it, I'm going to Vegas!" isn't leadership.
Okay, I don't want to argue about the exact semantics of the word theft and what kinds of "misuse of funds" it includes. Nothing went in his pocket; it wasn't embezzlement.
And Shkreli was moving money between companies and lying to investors, neither of which is relevant here.
More importantly, none of that explains what is sociopathic here.
> He easily could have lost that bet, and that money could have reimbursed credit card bills for his employees.
But would it have been used that way? Or would it have kept propping the company up for a bit longer until total collapse?
> How that isn't reckless and malfeasance, I don't understand. "We're screwed. I can use the last of this money to try to do something right, or fuck it, I'm going to Vegas!" isn't leadership.
I never said it wasn't reckless. But he got the business out of being screwed. If he failed, the business would have gone from screwed to... also screwed. What "do something right" do you have in mind that was so important it becomes sociopathic if he doesn't do it? And it has to be something that would have happened if he didn't gamble, but wouldn't have happened if he lost.
In other words, if your claim is right then there has to be a big human-impacting difference between the "he does nothing" outcome and the "he loses the gamble" outcome. And I'm not really seeing that difference. If both scenarios involve total shutdown and the only difference is a few days, that ain't it.
> I don't want to argue about the exact semantics of the word theft and what kinds of "misuse of funds" it includes. Nothing went in his pocket; it wasn't embezzlement.
See, the law very much disagrees with you here. It went into his pocket, and from there on a card table at Vegas. The moment he had decided to use company money like this, it was taken from its rightful owner.
But the money stayed owned by the company the entire time. He bet it on behalf of the company.
Companies are allowed to make bets on things. And he was high up enough to be able to make that decision.
It went in his pocket, but it would have gone in his pocket if he was going to the office supply store too. That's not an issue.
But none of this explains why it's sociopathic. Most crimes don't rise to that bar. For example, embezzling money from a company that's already guaranteed to collapse and unable to make payroll is generally not sociopathic. Especially if it's some kind of technical embezzlement where you have no personal gain whatsoever.
Then they should have started easing off spending "6-8 weeks ago" if not sooner. Cancel contracts, stop dev projects, get rid of non essential personel, sell off unused assets, maybe even start laying off people, etc.
