One distinct change in American capitalism over the last half-century has been the buyout. Rather than build firms that would last, and in many cases continue a family legacy, enterprises are created with a notion of selling them to some other entity. The idea, in simplest terms, is to get rich right now.
The gold rush employees after a corporate buyout sounds so easy, so alluring, so deserved. Well, imagine the surprise of a number of Skype executives when they found themselves pink slipped in the wake of Microsoft's acquisition of the Luxembourg-based Internet-calling service. The execs were fired before the Microsoft deal closed. The practical effect of the dismissals was to diminish the value of the execs' payouts. In other words, they're going to get far less money than they had bargained for. It turned out that "getting rich right now" didn't include Skype's executed execs.
The complete story originally appeared in Bloomberg News and was reprinted in the Mercury News.
No comments:
Post a Comment