[sxp]

The unanswered question is how much he profited from the move of selling the company. If firing all of the old people, devaluing their stock to $0, and reforming the company netted him a $1M bonus, then he is still a greedy bastard and donating a few thousand dollars to a fund doesn't change that. When something similar happened at my previous company, the people in charge got a large cash award as part of the acquisition while a bunch of employees lost their jobs and had their stock devalued to $0 so it is plausible that the same thing happened here. At another company I was at, the CEO laid off a large portion of the company for budget reasons but also paid us 2 weeks of salary out of his personal account in addition to our normal severance pay.

$50k split between all the people who made this decision is a trivial amount of money compared to their salaries and bonuses.

[wilschroter]

Let's first agree that none of us knows.

What if he did NOT profit? What if he lost millions of his own personal net worth? Would you consider him the opposite of a bastard?

There are very few instances where a company takes a complete header like this and the CEO gets paid handsomely. And how can you compare being in $40 million of cash debt and putting the company to ABC against selling a company in an acquisition?