After firing 900 on Zoom calls, Better CEO Vishal Garg now sued for misleading investors

Vishal Garg, the CEO of Better.com, said he is personally liable for SoftBank loan and after five years, he will have nothing. Here are all details.

Chief Executive Officer Vishal Garg is once again in the news  (Bloomberg)

After drawing attention for firing 900 employees over a Zoom call, Vishal Garg, the CEO of Better.com, is once again in the limelight for all the wrong reasons — this time with an ex-employee suing him. A former employee of Better.com has sued the company and Garg, accusing them of misleading the investors. Sarah Pierce, a former executive vice-president for sales and operations at Better.com, says in her lawsuit that Garg “misrepresented Better.com's statements to ensure investors go through with a SPAC merger instead of withdrawing due to its financial condition.”

In a statement to Reuters, a company lawyer on behalf of better.com says that the claims were "without merit”. Better.com is a company that offers mortgage and insurance products to homeowners. Headquartered in New York, the company is headed by Indian-American business entrepreneur Vishal Garg who came to the limelight last year after he fired 900 employees in one go on a Zoom call. Later, Garg apologised for the way he handled the issue.

Better.com CEO in trouble again

In 2022, Garg sent a mail to his employees, acknowledging that he personally guaranteed $750 million of the $1.5 billion cash infusion into the company by SoftBank. "I am fully committed with everything I own and will ever own. Five years from now, when that SoftBank $750 million loan comes due around my 50th birthday, it means I have nothing. Well, at least we will have given it a real shot... this is true. I did personally guarantee three quarters of a billion dollars and I'm personally liable for it," Garg told the employees.

After the incident, Garg continued to be a controversial figure. He wrote an anonymous post on the company message board, accusing the laid-off employees of stealing from the company by working just two hours a day. "You guys know that at least 250 of the people terminated were working an average of 2 hours a day while clocking in 8 hours+ a day in the payroll system? They were stealing from you and stealing from our customers who pay the bills that pay our bills. Get educated," Garg wrote.

Garg later admitted that the post was written by him.