190 workers FIRED and CEO gets $200 MILLION Bonus - What ACTUALLY happened at #Blizzard #bobbykotick

what up first video from the new house i know i'm a little bit late on this story but i figured i would just chime in because there's more to the story than uh most of these news outlets are actually saying so if you haven't heard 190 people got let go from blizzard they got 90 days severance package which is pretty nice that's six hx that they get to to use uh and then they get to keep their health insurance for one year and health insurance in the united states is expensive and the company's paying 100 of your premium that's that's a lot of money for them to spend and then lastly they got a 200 battle net gift card to spend on the store which it's not actually 200 that's that's the thing blizzard didn't buy 200 and then convert it into a gift card they just generated 200 worth of credit for their digital store um it's not actual money so i don't know it kind of feels a little bit low kind of like a slap in the face they didn't have to do anything at all but like if you're gonna let people go at least give them a gift card that you they can spend it amazon or maybe like a visa gift card or something but then you know they would actually have to buy something and the company would have to pay taxes and all that stuff so it's a lot easier for them to just generate free in-game store credit and it always sucks to get let go from a company it's happened to me happens to a lot of you guys they were letting go initially 50 people from the esports section but nobody's going out to esports events anymore so they didn't need those 50 slots but what ended up happening was they they let go close to two percent of the company and that was 190 people and not just 50 people and the way that the news is kind of angling it is that the ceo of activision blizzard not just blizzard blizzard itself has a separate ceo but it's owned by activision and bobby kodik kadik i don't know how to say his last name but he got a bonus of 200 million dollars and the way that the news makes it look is that these people got fired and he got a 200 million dollar bonus but that's not actually what happened the ceo signed a contract in 2016 that said if he brought the stock price up by x percent by the year 2020 then he would get a payout percentage based on how much he raised the stock price and that just happened to be at the same time all of these people got let go so this is the original agreement between blizzard and bobby this was made on november 22nd 2016. it says bobby will continue to receive his current base salary of 2.366 million dollars beginning january 1st 2017 his salary will be reduced to the annual rate of 1.75 million dollars that's still an insane base salary i imagine the taxes on that w-2 is insane but anyways back to bobby's 200 million dollar bonus okay number one it wasn't actually 200 million dollars straight cash that's not how this ended up working out at all the ceo bobby got 1 million 300 000 shares of blizzard stock and of which those shares he only got to keep 465 000 shares which is still a boatload of money but the company kept 865 000 to pay taxes so instead of getting 131 he got 41 million dollars worth of stock it wasn't cash money that he got it's not even worth 41 million if he tried to sell 41 million dollars worth of stock he would crash the stock price and he wouldn't get 41 million dollars um the way the news kind of spun that was a little odd and here's where you can see the actual payout of the stock we can see this was securities acquired 904 000 and then 430 000. down here you can see the company withheld 878 000 and gave him 456 000 shares of stock he also has 1.6 million shares of stock that are performance vesting and an additional 3 million 155 000 shares of stock another thing that was in the ceo's contract in 2016 was that his base salary was 2 million 600 000 which is still is still an egregious amount of money but he took a pay cut down to 1.7 million dollars base salary and did the i think it's called the shareholder value creation incentive and so he took a one million dollar pay cut kind of bet basically he was like if i can get the share price stock price up to x percent i get rewarded based on how much i bring up that stock price that was kind of the bet that he made and he made it happen but that's the argument right is one person directly responsible for how much the stock price increased for blizzard i'm gonna say no in a company with thousands of people one guy gets that much credit for bringing the company value up you know there's a lot of workers at this company it's i don't you know 41 million dollars worth of stock that he gets to keep at least at the current price of i think it's 90 dollars per share right now i still think that's a little outrageous for any one person i think if you had just taken you know maybe one percent of that and cashed it out for the employees you would have been able to keep all of the 190 employees he plays the business game that's he doesn't care you know he's out for profit that's all that matters to him as i was doing research about bobby the ceo of activision blizzard i found out that in his contract he owns a charter aviation service for private jets and blizzard reimburses him for use of his own company so this guy is he's really playing the business game he owns his private jet company he uses his private jet company at blizzard and then blizzard pays his private jet company which then he takes money from that and pays himself by the way i looked up bobby's aviation company called cove aviation these are the two vehicles that he has he has a bell 429 helicopter and he has a gulfstream g280 2014. the g280 is 25 million dollars and used g280s are 12 million dollars here's where you can see how bobby big brains paying himself additionally with a second company the company will pay reasonable expenses related to bobby's use of non-commercial transportation services for business related travel including the use of transportation and aviation services provided by cove aviation partners this is indirectly owned and operated by bobby as previously approved by the company's audit committee you can rent his g280 gulfstream super midjet for 5100 an hour you can rent his hb bell helicopter for 4 200 an hour so if bobby is using these to travel wherever he needs to go for business related reasons he's making a lot of money if he flies somewhere for if that's four hours away his company just made twenty thousand dollars and it's his company so he i don't know it's just insane how much he can pay himself with his own company from blizzard and that's completely okay with blizzard so but anyways guys that's all i got for you today if you enjoyed this video leave a like because you like the video not for the algorithm of course and leave a comment let me know what you think and if you'd like me to cover any more of these stories and kind of i really tried to be objective here and instead of being like companies suck and like blah blah blah and just like show you what actually happened and how this works but yeah that's it thanks so much for being here see you guys in the next one [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Joshua Fluke

Views: 49,865

Rating: 4.9527807 out of 5

Keywords: joshua fluke, code bootcamp, javascript, how to code, web development, brand, developer interview, developer jobs, corporate cringe, divorce, story i dont talk about, entrepreneurship, digital brand, activision blizzard, bobby kotick, blizzard stock, blizzard layoffs, blizzard firing, bellular

Id: ueeJZ9yRfyo

Length: 8min 1sec (481 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021