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> "EA is not a struggling company," the statement reads. "With annual revenues reaching $7.5 billion and $1 billion in profit each year, EA is one of the larges

> "EA is not a struggling company," the statement reads. "With annual revenues reaching $7.5 billion and $1 billion in profit each year, EA is one of the largest video game developers and publishers in the world." Seems to be a common theme in 2025: Actually-healthy companies cosplaying as struggling companies, as an excuse to justify layoffs and other activities that transfer wealth and power from employees to management and shareholders. Like, does anyone think any of these BigTech (and MediumTech) companies who are all doing layoffs are really "struggling" and "vulnerable"? It's always just an unbelievable excuse.

glimshe 1y ago
This is multifaceted question. I agree with what you're saying, but let me add something. Corporations are greedy and let go of many good people. But they also let go of many people who deserved to go. It's really hard to get rid of bad people, even in the US. But you wouldn't believe how many bad people were in big tech because of the COVID over hiring. I've seen dozens, if not hundreds of people, who went to FAANG and added next to no value. As a manager in one of these companies, I had to deal with a mix of great people and many who were absolutely taking advantage of the company. I could write a book about it. Good for them, but it's not surprising that the party would end someday.
- eli_gottlieb 1y ago
  > It's really hard to get rid of bad people, even in the US. Could you explain why it's hard? I've never seen anyone run into any kind of difficulty letting go an at-will employee. The manager can do so at any time, for any reason or no reason at all.
  - mikestew 1y ago
    And the company can be sued at any time, for any reason or no reason at all. That does not mean the plaintiff will win, but against deep enough pockets, it can be worth a try. PIPs take time, and HR isn’t about to let you skip them, and bad employees know they’ve got six months to spend their workday looking for a new job while not doing their current job. I’ve worked at those companies, and sometimes managed at same, and when OP says they have stories, I believe them.
    - nkozyra 1y ago
      It would not be worth a try if not for a very legitimate reason. Being laid off and mounting a civil case against deep pockets doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
    - lesuorac 1y ago
      Which is why severance payments in fang are tied to not suing the company. If that works when you lay of 10% of the company why doesn't it work when you want to fire 1 individual? You can definitely argue it's not fair to pay somebody extra for not doing a job but the alternative seems to be you keep paying them even more to keep not doing a job (and possibly doing negative work). Rather than put somebody on a pip for x months just offer them x months of salary to quit. Same money, same work done.
      - zdragnar 1y ago
        You don't give people severance when you fire them, you only give them severance when you lay them off. There's a legal distinction which impacts whether or not the employee is eligible for unemployment benefits, among other things.
        lesuorac 1y ago
        Then layoff a singular individual with severance instead of firing them lol... (although legally "firing" vs "layoff" is irrelevant, depending on the situation you can get benefits despite being what a layperson considered quitting [1]). [1]: https://www.darwingray.com/from-desk-to-departure-when-moving-an-employees-desk-could-lead-to-an-unfair-dismissal-claim/ https://www.darwingray.com/from-desk-to-departure-when-movin...
    - onraglanroad 1y ago
      I don't. The company could be sued by a non employee too. What difference does that make? And if your company procedure requires a PIP, then you do that. Again, where's the difficulty? Nothing you've said sounds difficult in the slightest. It's following procedure.
  - wmeredith 1y ago
    I'm not the poster you were responding to, but I have some experience in this. I am an engineering manager at medium size US company. If I want to fire a poor performer it requires a couple months of detailed documentation on their poor performance, and that's just so I can get them on a PIP (performance improvement plan). That's another 30-90 days. The PIP takes time to prepare and performance during the PIP also has to be rigorously documented. This has been my experience at two different companies in multiple cases with egregious underperformance. I suppose if an employee assaulted/harassed someone or was doing something else outright illegal like theft or embezzlement, they would be shown the door immediately. But if someone is half-assing their work and dragging the team down, everyone has to put up with it for months as they get second chances, micromanagement, and other special attention before they can actually be let go. I think it's due to the litigiousness of the US culture. Yes, US companies can fire people at will, but they can also file lawsuits at will, which are costly (time+money) no matter the outcome.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      This has never made sense to me. In the US, you can fire someone because you don't like that they wore a green shirt! As long as it's not for one of those specific, enumerated forbidden reasons, companies have total freedom to hire and fire. I was fired once, and there were no PIPs, no documentation, no warning, no nothing. Just "We aren't doing this work anymore and don't need you" and that was that.
      - Edman274 1y ago
        If you happen to wear a green shirt on St. Patrick's Day, then maybe you can sue and say that you were fired because your boss is bigoted against Irish Americans. No one ever comes right out and says that they're firing someone for an illegal reason, so the PIP and the rest of that song and dance is to try to prove that it was above board for a potential lawsuit, which companies seek to avoid at all costs.
      - Aurornis 1y ago
        > In the US, you can fire someone because you don't like that they wore a green shirt! And if that employee can show that other people were allowed to wear green shirts without being fired, they can use that to support an illegal discrimination claim against the company. The reason it takes effort and documentation to fire people is because companies want to have a uniform set of rules that are applied equally to all employees. They also want documentation to support the firing. Having a consistent process, applied equally and with supporting documentation discourages people from even trying to bring frivolous lawsuits. Having additional process is also a check on managers. Some managers try to fire anyone they disagree with, dislike, or even to do things like open headcount so they can fill it with a nepotism hire. Putting process in place and requiring documentation discourages managers from firing people frivolously and adds another level of checks and balances to discourage gaming the system.
  - zdragnar 1y ago
    I worked for an agency company (mostly T&M contracts) that went through a round of layoffs almost entirely because they wanted to be "like a family" and the managers didn't let poor performers go. I think they ended up cutting something like 10% of their workforce, including underperformers and all new hires, in an effort to get cash flow moving in the right direction again. It was incredibly rough- a lot of people who weren't being told they needed to shape up or ship out were instead simply told they're being shipped out. The only upside is managers got better about supporting employees later on who weren't performing, including putting people on PIPs rather than letting them coast.
  - stronglikedan 1y ago
    It depends on the size of the company as to what needs to be documented to let someone go. SMBs can let people go much easier, and the smaller, the easier. But what you cannot do in any circumstance is let people go "for any reason". There are laws against that at any size, and you are looking for a lawsuit if you give a reason. It's best to just tell them their position has been eliminated due to restructuring (has to be provable if you're a big company), and give them no reason beyond that. If you don't give a reason, they have nothing to bring a lawsuit for. In summary, reasons are not always required, but are always a liability.
  - earthnail 1y ago
    There are internal reasons as well. Letting go of people can be highly disruptive and create uncertainty in your team. It’s a very unpleasant job that can also go wrong, especially if you have to fire loads. Then there’s the perverse incentive that bigger teams usually equals a promotion. So if you’re the honest manager who manages a tight team and fires people, you won’t get promoted as often. Top management knows this, of course. To sidestep these misaligned incentives a company-wide one-time layoff is really effective.
- fifticon 1y ago
  but who takes responsiblility for hiring those 'bad' people in the first place.. I am not saying you should't get rid of them, but the issue makes me think of that kind of people, who for some reason always think that it is someone other than themselves who must adjust and adapt.
  - glimshe 1y ago
    Those who overhired should have been fired, I agree. It's incredible (or not) that the CEOs weren't eliminated.
  - grogenaut 1y ago
    The people who hired them may be long gone by now.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    Can't speak for every company, but most companies I've worked for with detailed hiring practices would evaluate the long-term outcomes of people that hiring managers chose. If someone hired a lot of people who had to be laid off later, they would get more supervision and review of future hires.
- reactordev 1y ago
  >But you wouldn't believe how many bad people were in big tech because of the COVID over hiring. There’s no correlation. They hired expecting a certain type of growth. They fired because of AI. The narrative that they were getting rid of bad workers was their excuse, not the reason. Many great engineers got let go. Many project managers that had been with the company through ups and downs. One guy was let go after being poached from a FAANG after his 3rd day. So don’t say anyone deserved it.
  - ahtihn 1y ago
    Post-covid layoffs happened before ChatGPT, so it's certainly not because of AI. End of 0 interest rates is the more likely reason.
- jayd16 1y ago
  So like, what's the argument here? You felt FAANGs over hired and then had a good round of layoffs so every layoff is good and justified?
  - Nimitz14 1y ago
    There's still too much fat, or rather people who just add net negative value. My org would benefit from firing easily 50%.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- tharmas 1y ago
  I heard that the purpose of over hiring during Covid was to hoard talent. That is, to prevent another company from hiring that talent.
bko 1y ago
I don't think you need to "justify layoffs". If a company feels an employee is not being productive, they should be allowed to let them go. Same way if an employee feels he is getting underpaid or wants to work somewhere else, they should be allowed to leave. I've actually always liked working for companies in which the objective was straight forward. None of this "we're a family" stuff. You should be kind, and all the places I was at were kind. But layoffs are a reality and reducing headcount at times is part of that. You need a way to get rid of dead wood, otherwise you would be too afraid to grow and hire when you need to.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > I don't think you need to "justify layoffs". Layoffs are a signal to markets of struggles, and firms absolutely do, in practice, need to justify them (and their scale and focus) to avoid the risk of a self-fulfilling market perception that they signal a problems that they do not fully resolve. (If there is already a problem narrative, much of the justification is obvious, and the firm just needs to cover explaining how the layoffs address the problem.)
  - helge9210 1y ago
    If we assume the company runs N projects with positive Net Present Value (NPV) at the start of the project and after re-evaluation some of the project NPV turned to be negative, closing the project and laying off the staff will actually make company worth more.
    - dragonwriter 1y ago
      Yes, but the reason you will see companies put out press releases explaining layoffs is because the market does not on its own make such generous assumptions reliably when it sees layoffs. (And even if it does, the fact that the NPV of a project "turned negative" indicates that the value of the company dropped, and the layoffs are only a partial mitigation, which still hurts the perception of the company if the market hadn't discovered and priced in the drop before the company did and reacted with layoffs.)
jayd16 1y ago
Games are a deep pipeline. Technically they would be looking at cost and revenue projections 3-5 years out, not this year or last year. That said, I think its completely justified for union bargaining to push back on the idea that its the emplpoyees that should burden that problem.
leetharris 1y ago
This is the nature of public markets. Not everything should be public. In fact, MOST things should not be public. Because being public forces accountability and liability to shareholders in a way that is completely unlike being private. A company can be successful by most metrics, but if certain trends are not heading in the right direction, then faith in the stock drops, employee compensation goes down, future investments become dicey, etc. This is the nature of public companies. This is why they don't want to be public anymore.
Eric_WVGG 1y ago
EA is about as successful as it is possible for a videogame company to get. There's a finite number of gamers, hours in the day, and cash that those gamers can spend, and EA is getting a healthy chunk of it. If the point of a corporation is profitability and good product, they had that. But if the point is growth, then all that leaves is branching into other verticals, which leaves… movies and gambling? loving that late stage capitalism!
screye 1y ago
> as an excuse to justify layoffs and other activities that transfer wealth and power from employees to management and shareholders Video game employees (programmers) are famously overworked, layoff prone and have little say in executive matters. I can't imagine how PE could make things worse. The video game industry has been in an odd place for a while. The 2020s haven't produced many reliable AAA hits.
manoDev 1y ago
Salaried workers sell their time in advance with promises of promotions, bonuses or stock in the future. So what (public) companies do is over hire during growth, then lay off later to transfer the value created by these workers to shareholders. Rinse, repeat.
yunyu 1y ago
As a shareholder of many companies, I would be disappointed if the management team made decisions that disproportionately benefited employees at the expense of other non-employee shareholders.
- RobotCaleb 1y ago
  Yeah, because you as the shareholder are worth more to the company and society than the people at the company.
  - yunyu 1y ago
    The goal of most companies is to maximize returns to shareholders, not society or employees. If it wasn't that I wouldn't have invested.
    - RobotCaleb 1y ago
      I'm not saying that you're wrong, just implying that it's not right.
    - bcrosby95 1y ago
      It's part of the social contract. Corps and limited liability don't have to exist - they aren't some natural thing, they are something we made up because its useful to society. Once it stops being useful we can axe them.
  - terminalshort 1y ago
    Considering he paid to be a shareholder, and the company is paying the employees to be there, that makes sense.
- andrepd 1y ago
  Which is why—to invoke a cliché—the problem is the system, not individual people doing what benefits them inside the system.
ActionHank 1y ago
Won't somebody please think of the executives?
gigatexal 1y ago
because investors think things can and must go up and to the right and at ever faster rates or the public stock price will fall. this idea is silly and unsustainable if you think about it just for 2 seconds.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> Actually-healthy companies cosplaying as struggling companies, as an excuse to justify layoffs This is a negotiation. You’re seeing one side message. The union didn’t have a say in whether EA got acquired. But it does have the ability to make it a mess. Part of that ability is in public messaging. So you’d expect to see , if the union is savvy, public grandstanding and threats paired with private negotiations for better terms for union members, whether that be immunity from lay-offs or some other wins.
- echelon 1y ago
  I don't know where to attach this comment. This isn't about PE juicing the company and doing layoffs. This is about transplanting and nurturing a lucrative industry into a former Petro state. This is sowing the seeds of a prosperous, post-oil world. It's an investment in the future as the world is changing. This will look more like Lenovo and Thinkpad North Carolina than a PE shake down and gutting. The jobs will not evaporate, but they will absolutely start cross-training engineers in the Middle East and building up new talent there.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > jobs will not evaporate, but they will absolutely start cross-training engineers in the Middle East and building up new talent there If this is what the union fears, this is the moment to negotiate safeguards.
underlipton 1y ago
Conspiracy theory: they are vulnerable. Almost everyone is, because almost everyone is party to the credit/money-printing grift that has kept markets from collapsing since (depending on your perspective) 2015/2019/2022. Especially the big, "healthy" companies. They're going private because it would allow them to mask their losses in a coming recession.

glimshe 1y ago

This is multifaceted question. I agree with what you're saying, but let me add something. Corporations are greedy and let go of many good people. But they also let go of many people who deserved to go. It's really hard to get rid of bad people, even in the US. But you wouldn't believe how many bad people were in big tech because of the COVID over hiring. I've seen dozens, if not hundreds of people, who went to FAANG and added next to no value. As a manager in one of these companies, I had to deal with a mix of great people and many who were absolutely taking advantage of the company. I could write a book about it. Good for them, but it's not surprising that the party would end someday.

eli_gottlieb 1y ago
> It's really hard to get rid of bad people, even in the US. Could you explain why it's hard? I've never seen anyone run into any kind of difficulty letting go an at-will employee. The manager can do so at any time, for any reason or no reason at all.
- mikestew 1y ago
  And the company can be sued at any time, for any reason or no reason at all. That does not mean the plaintiff will win, but against deep enough pockets, it can be worth a try. PIPs take time, and HR isn’t about to let you skip them, and bad employees know they’ve got six months to spend their workday looking for a new job while not doing their current job. I’ve worked at those companies, and sometimes managed at same, and when OP says they have stories, I believe them.
  - nkozyra 1y ago
    It would not be worth a try if not for a very legitimate reason. Being laid off and mounting a civil case against deep pockets doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
  - lesuorac 1y ago
    Which is why severance payments in fang are tied to not suing the company. If that works when you lay of 10% of the company why doesn't it work when you want to fire 1 individual? You can definitely argue it's not fair to pay somebody extra for not doing a job but the alternative seems to be you keep paying them even more to keep not doing a job (and possibly doing negative work). Rather than put somebody on a pip for x months just offer them x months of salary to quit. Same money, same work done.
    - zdragnar 1y ago
      You don't give people severance when you fire them, you only give them severance when you lay them off. There's a legal distinction which impacts whether or not the employee is eligible for unemployment benefits, among other things.
      - lesuorac 1y ago
        Then layoff a singular individual with severance instead of firing them lol... (although legally "firing" vs "layoff" is irrelevant, depending on the situation you can get benefits despite being what a layperson considered quitting [1]). [1]: https://www.darwingray.com/from-desk-to-departure-when-moving-an-employees-desk-could-lead-to-an-unfair-dismissal-claim/ https://www.darwingray.com/from-desk-to-departure-when-movin...
  - onraglanroad 1y ago
    I don't. The company could be sued by a non employee too. What difference does that make? And if your company procedure requires a PIP, then you do that. Again, where's the difficulty? Nothing you've said sounds difficult in the slightest. It's following procedure.
- wmeredith 1y ago
  I'm not the poster you were responding to, but I have some experience in this. I am an engineering manager at medium size US company. If I want to fire a poor performer it requires a couple months of detailed documentation on their poor performance, and that's just so I can get them on a PIP (performance improvement plan). That's another 30-90 days. The PIP takes time to prepare and performance during the PIP also has to be rigorously documented. This has been my experience at two different companies in multiple cases with egregious underperformance. I suppose if an employee assaulted/harassed someone or was doing something else outright illegal like theft or embezzlement, they would be shown the door immediately. But if someone is half-assing their work and dragging the team down, everyone has to put up with it for months as they get second chances, micromanagement, and other special attention before they can actually be let go. I think it's due to the litigiousness of the US culture. Yes, US companies can fire people at will, but they can also file lawsuits at will, which are costly (time+money) no matter the outcome.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    This has never made sense to me. In the US, you can fire someone because you don't like that they wore a green shirt! As long as it's not for one of those specific, enumerated forbidden reasons, companies have total freedom to hire and fire. I was fired once, and there were no PIPs, no documentation, no warning, no nothing. Just "We aren't doing this work anymore and don't need you" and that was that.
    - Edman274 1y ago
      If you happen to wear a green shirt on St. Patrick's Day, then maybe you can sue and say that you were fired because your boss is bigoted against Irish Americans. No one ever comes right out and says that they're firing someone for an illegal reason, so the PIP and the rest of that song and dance is to try to prove that it was above board for a potential lawsuit, which companies seek to avoid at all costs.
    - Aurornis 1y ago
      > In the US, you can fire someone because you don't like that they wore a green shirt! And if that employee can show that other people were allowed to wear green shirts without being fired, they can use that to support an illegal discrimination claim against the company. The reason it takes effort and documentation to fire people is because companies want to have a uniform set of rules that are applied equally to all employees. They also want documentation to support the firing. Having a consistent process, applied equally and with supporting documentation discourages people from even trying to bring frivolous lawsuits. Having additional process is also a check on managers. Some managers try to fire anyone they disagree with, dislike, or even to do things like open headcount so they can fill it with a nepotism hire. Putting process in place and requiring documentation discourages managers from firing people frivolously and adds another level of checks and balances to discourage gaming the system.
- zdragnar 1y ago
  I worked for an agency company (mostly T&M contracts) that went through a round of layoffs almost entirely because they wanted to be "like a family" and the managers didn't let poor performers go. I think they ended up cutting something like 10% of their workforce, including underperformers and all new hires, in an effort to get cash flow moving in the right direction again. It was incredibly rough- a lot of people who weren't being told they needed to shape up or ship out were instead simply told they're being shipped out. The only upside is managers got better about supporting employees later on who weren't performing, including putting people on PIPs rather than letting them coast.
- stronglikedan 1y ago
  It depends on the size of the company as to what needs to be documented to let someone go. SMBs can let people go much easier, and the smaller, the easier. But what you cannot do in any circumstance is let people go "for any reason". There are laws against that at any size, and you are looking for a lawsuit if you give a reason. It's best to just tell them their position has been eliminated due to restructuring (has to be provable if you're a big company), and give them no reason beyond that. If you don't give a reason, they have nothing to bring a lawsuit for. In summary, reasons are not always required, but are always a liability.
- earthnail 1y ago
  There are internal reasons as well. Letting go of people can be highly disruptive and create uncertainty in your team. It’s a very unpleasant job that can also go wrong, especially if you have to fire loads. Then there’s the perverse incentive that bigger teams usually equals a promotion. So if you’re the honest manager who manages a tight team and fires people, you won’t get promoted as often. Top management knows this, of course. To sidestep these misaligned incentives a company-wide one-time layoff is really effective.
fifticon 1y ago
but who takes responsiblility for hiring those 'bad' people in the first place.. I am not saying you should't get rid of them, but the issue makes me think of that kind of people, who for some reason always think that it is someone other than themselves who must adjust and adapt.
- glimshe 1y ago
  Those who overhired should have been fired, I agree. It's incredible (or not) that the CEOs weren't eliminated.
- grogenaut 1y ago
  The people who hired them may be long gone by now.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  Can't speak for every company, but most companies I've worked for with detailed hiring practices would evaluate the long-term outcomes of people that hiring managers chose. If someone hired a lot of people who had to be laid off later, they would get more supervision and review of future hires.
reactordev 1y ago
>But you wouldn't believe how many bad people were in big tech because of the COVID over hiring. There’s no correlation. They hired expecting a certain type of growth. They fired because of AI. The narrative that they were getting rid of bad workers was their excuse, not the reason. Many great engineers got let go. Many project managers that had been with the company through ups and downs. One guy was let go after being poached from a FAANG after his 3rd day. So don’t say anyone deserved it.
- ahtihn 1y ago
  Post-covid layoffs happened before ChatGPT, so it's certainly not because of AI. End of 0 interest rates is the more likely reason.
jayd16 1y ago
So like, what's the argument here? You felt FAANGs over hired and then had a good round of layoffs so every layoff is good and justified?
- Nimitz14 1y ago
  There's still too much fat, or rather people who just add net negative value. My org would benefit from firing easily 50%.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
tharmas 1y ago
I heard that the purpose of over hiring during Covid was to hoard talent. That is, to prevent another company from hiring that talent.

bko 1y ago

I don't think you need to "justify layoffs". If a company feels an employee is not being productive, they should be allowed to let them go. Same way if an employee feels he is getting underpaid or wants to work somewhere else, they should be allowed to leave. I've actually always liked working for companies in which the objective was straight forward. None of this "we're a family" stuff. You should be kind, and all the places I was at were kind. But layoffs are a reality and reducing headcount at times is part of that. You need a way to get rid of dead wood, otherwise you would be too afraid to grow and hire when you need to.

dragonwriter 1y ago
> I don't think you need to "justify layoffs". Layoffs are a signal to markets of struggles, and firms absolutely do, in practice, need to justify them (and their scale and focus) to avoid the risk of a self-fulfilling market perception that they signal a problems that they do not fully resolve. (If there is already a problem narrative, much of the justification is obvious, and the firm just needs to cover explaining how the layoffs address the problem.)
- helge9210 1y ago
  If we assume the company runs N projects with positive Net Present Value (NPV) at the start of the project and after re-evaluation some of the project NPV turned to be negative, closing the project and laying off the staff will actually make company worth more.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    Yes, but the reason you will see companies put out press releases explaining layoffs is because the market does not on its own make such generous assumptions reliably when it sees layoffs. (And even if it does, the fact that the NPV of a project "turned negative" indicates that the value of the company dropped, and the layoffs are only a partial mitigation, which still hurts the perception of the company if the market hadn't discovered and priced in the drop before the company did and reacted with layoffs.)

jayd16 1y ago

Games are a deep pipeline. Technically they would be looking at cost and revenue projections 3-5 years out, not this year or last year. That said, I think its completely justified for union bargaining to push back on the idea that its the emplpoyees that should burden that problem.

leetharris 1y ago

This is the nature of public markets. Not everything should be public. In fact, MOST things should not be public. Because being public forces accountability and liability to shareholders in a way that is completely unlike being private. A company can be successful by most metrics, but if certain trends are not heading in the right direction, then faith in the stock drops, employee compensation goes down, future investments become dicey, etc. This is the nature of public companies. This is why they don't want to be public anymore.

Eric_WVGG 1y ago

EA is about as successful as it is possible for a videogame company to get. There's a finite number of gamers, hours in the day, and cash that those gamers can spend, and EA is getting a healthy chunk of it. If the point of a corporation is profitability and good product, they had that. But if the point is growth, then all that leaves is branching into other verticals, which leaves… movies and gambling? loving that late stage capitalism!

screye 1y ago

> as an excuse to justify layoffs and other activities that transfer wealth and power from employees to management and shareholders Video game employees (programmers) are famously overworked, layoff prone and have little say in executive matters. I can't imagine how PE could make things worse. The video game industry has been in an odd place for a while. The 2020s haven't produced many reliable AAA hits.

manoDev 1y ago

Salaried workers sell their time in advance with promises of promotions, bonuses or stock in the future. So what (public) companies do is over hire during growth, then lay off later to transfer the value created by these workers to shareholders. Rinse, repeat.

yunyu 1y ago

As a shareholder of many companies, I would be disappointed if the management team made decisions that disproportionately benefited employees at the expense of other non-employee shareholders.

RobotCaleb 1y ago
Yeah, because you as the shareholder are worth more to the company and society than the people at the company.
- yunyu 1y ago
  The goal of most companies is to maximize returns to shareholders, not society or employees. If it wasn't that I wouldn't have invested.
  - RobotCaleb 1y ago
    I'm not saying that you're wrong, just implying that it's not right.
  - bcrosby95 1y ago
    It's part of the social contract. Corps and limited liability don't have to exist - they aren't some natural thing, they are something we made up because its useful to society. Once it stops being useful we can axe them.
- terminalshort 1y ago
  Considering he paid to be a shareholder, and the company is paying the employees to be there, that makes sense.
andrepd 1y ago
Which is why—to invoke a cliché—the problem is the system, not individual people doing what benefits them inside the system.

ActionHank 1y ago

Won't somebody please think of the executives?

gigatexal 1y ago

because investors think things can and must go up and to the right and at ever faster rates or the public stock price will fall. this idea is silly and unsustainable if you think about it just for 2 seconds.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

> Actually-healthy companies cosplaying as struggling companies, as an excuse to justify layoffs This is a negotiation. You’re seeing one side message. The union didn’t have a say in whether EA got acquired. But it does have the ability to make it a mess. Part of that ability is in public messaging. So you’d expect to see , if the union is savvy, public grandstanding and threats paired with private negotiations for better terms for union members, whether that be immunity from lay-offs or some other wins.

echelon 1y ago
I don't know where to attach this comment. This isn't about PE juicing the company and doing layoffs. This is about transplanting and nurturing a lucrative industry into a former Petro state. This is sowing the seeds of a prosperous, post-oil world. It's an investment in the future as the world is changing. This will look more like Lenovo and Thinkpad North Carolina than a PE shake down and gutting. The jobs will not evaporate, but they will absolutely start cross-training engineers in the Middle East and building up new talent there.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > jobs will not evaporate, but they will absolutely start cross-training engineers in the Middle East and building up new talent there If this is what the union fears, this is the moment to negotiate safeguards.

underlipton 1y ago

Conspiracy theory: they are vulnerable. Almost everyone is, because almost everyone is party to the credit/money-printing grift that has kept markets from collapsing since (depending on your perspective) 2015/2019/2022. Especially the big, "healthy" companies. They're going private because it would allow them to mask their losses in a coming recession.