“As CEO, I take full responsibility for this decision and the circumstances that led to it, and I’m truly sorry to those impacted by this change,” he wrote. “This market is moving fast and investors are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into this space. This both validates the opportunity we’ve been pursuing and underscores the need for even more urgency, even more aggressive investment, and decisive action.”
Leaders often claim that they are taking accountability when they screw up—and they should, as CEOs like Houston are the ones who mismanaged the company to the point of requiring layoffs in the first place. But rarely does “taking accountability” actually amount to much of anything. The most notable recent example is perhaps that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella asked the company’s board to reduce his pay in light of the major Crowdstrike hack. But in that case, his overall compensation still increased for the year by $30 million. Just, a little less up.
Lol