And of course the working people get screwed and bankrupted.
> Stock options had long been a major part of the Sierra compensation package, so most employees and former employees were affected by the overnight collapse in Cendant’s share price, and its continued fall. “I had a fair amount of my net worth at the time tied up in that stock,” says Mike Brochu. “Holy crap, it just plummeted to nothing.” Leslie Balfour, a writer and producer at Sierra until late 1997 saw her stock fall from $100,000 to $20,000. Al Lowe says he and his wife lost “the equivalent of a really nice home.”
...
> Less fortunate were the Sierra employees who’d borrowed on their stock options to buy houses, whose banks called in their loans when the stock fell and had to declare bankruptcy. “One of my employees,” Bowerman says, “went from being on paper a millionaire to being hundreds of thousands in debt with no way of payment. There were just dozens of horror stories like that.”
> “To this day,” he writes, “I am only 99% convinced that Walter was a crook. It remains unimaginable to me.”
> Stock options had long been a major part of the Sierra compensation package, so most employees and former employees were affected by the overnight collapse in Cendant’s share price, and its continued fall. “I had a fair amount of my net worth at the time tied up in that stock,” says Mike Brochu. “Holy crap, it just plummeted to nothing.” Leslie Balfour, a writer and producer at Sierra until late 1997 saw her stock fall from $100,000 to $20,000. Al Lowe says he and his wife lost “the equivalent of a really nice home.”
...
> Less fortunate were the Sierra employees who’d borrowed on their stock options to buy houses, whose banks called in their loans when the stock fell and had to declare bankruptcy. “One of my employees,” Bowerman says, “went from being on paper a millionaire to being hundreds of thousands in debt with no way of payment. There were just dozens of horror stories like that.”
> “To this day,” he writes, “I am only 99% convinced that Walter was a crook. It remains unimaginable to me.”