[LanceH]

Reading the story, it certainly seems like they were aiming for outrage. They say there was an accusation and they could have just not paid him $90million. They don't go into any of the contractual obligations of why they owe him that money. Nor do they explain how a mere accusation is going derail that payment. If outrage and journalism were fighting over ownership of that article, outrage won.

[cjbprime]

I think they didn't go into contractual obligations to pay him $90M because no such obligation existed.

It's something they decided to give him after it was decided that he should lose his job over the credible allegation of sexual assault.

[monaghanboy]

> It's something they decided to give him after it was decided that he should lose his job over the credible allegation of sexual assault.

Is this true? This is propagating spin, which the authors of the article made quite liberal use of.

I remember the article explicitly stating that they couldn't determine whether or not the decision to pay $90M was made with any relation whatsoever to the HR issue.

Yet they and others seem to keep labeling it as a "payout" anyway. When you keep repeating a thing, eventually it becomes true in the hive mind, which is what's happening here.

EDIT:

From the article:

> It is unclear if Mr. Page or the board knew of the investigation into the harassment complaint when Google approved the $150M grant for Mr. Rubin. Mr. Page, 45, did not respond to a request for a comment; Mr. Doerr and Mr. Shriram declined to comment.

And he got $90M when he was effectively fired, $60M less than the initial grant; see https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-...

Like others in this thread, I'm starting to believe the NYT is just as bad as FoxNews when it comes to manufacturing opinion and sensation (esp. against Big Tech these days) instead of presenting objective journalism.