Share prices for the mortgage lender Better.com tanked Thursday, hours after the company went public and nearly two years after CEO Vishal Garg unceremoniously laid off hundreds of employees via Zoom. By Friday morning, shares in the newly launched Better Home and Finance were trading at a more than 90 percent discount.
The crash was not entirely unexpected for Better, which built its business on lightning-fast home loans during the millennial home-buying spree that was the coronavirus pandemic. When the company first eyed going public in a SPAC merger with Aurora Acquisition Corp in 2021, it was valued at an eye-watering $7.7 billion. But in recent years, as mortgage rates skyrocketed and the housing market slowed, Better’s business has declined precipitously. According to SEC filings, the company lost $89 million in the first quarter of 2023 and more than $1 billion in the last two years combined. It also reported axing 91 percent of its staff in the last 18 months.
It didn’t help matters that Garg, 55, was making national headlines for his behavior toward staff. On top of the aforementioned Zoom layoffs, during which he congratulated himself for not crying, Garg also called his employees “dumb dolphins,” said they were “embarrassing” him, and referred to a major investor as “sewage.” In an incident exclusively reported by The Daily Beast last year, Garg brought an ax into the office as a gift for an executive who had laid off a number of employees.
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