From the headline I thought maybe they had accelerated the bonus payout schedule to squeeze money out of the company before the collapse, but the article says i

From the headline I thought maybe they had accelerated the bonus payout schedule to squeeze money out of the company before the collapse, but the article says it was scheduled long ago: > What to know: The bonuses were for work done during 2022, and were previously scheduled to be disbursed on March 10. That date ultimately coincided with the bank's takeover by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Furthermore, bonuses that were scheduled later in the month weren't paid out: > Bonuses for employees in some other countries were scheduled for later in the month, so those haven't yet been paid. So while the headline sounds bad and is likely going to generate outrage, this really just reads like normal payroll processing was happening on schedule. Note that payroll would have been coming out of a completely different bucket (e.g. not from customer reserves) and would have been submitted for processing prior to March 10th in order to be disbursed on March 10th. Also note that bonuses are an integral part of compensation, so withholding already-earned compensation from regular employees (the majority of which had nothing to do with the collapse issues) is an unreasonably punitive idea. So basically, the timing was coincidence unless someone can come up with some weird evidence that bankers delayed the collapse just long enough to get their bonuses, which seems far fetched. The collapse was triggered when they ran out of liquidity due to customer actions, which they couldn't have prevented. There's a similar outrage-bait story circulating about executives selling stock prior to the collapse, but that was also pre-scheduled sales that were planned long in advance.