Leaving people with healthcare for a singular day is just evil
It’s a dick move for sure, but the clawback of unvested shares is vicious. Not possible to know the total worth without being privy to the employment contracts of those let go, but for a single senior employee of long tenure it might constitute a 6- or 7-figure rip-off. Depending on the number of staff let go, the amount of options each held and what their strike prices were, this layoff could potentially constitute a clawback of options that would have been worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars of Sony shares.
The clawback in general isn’t really an issue; that’s how restricted stock grants work. You forfeit anything that hasn’t vested when you leave the company, no matter whose idea that is.
The problem is that it was Sony stock, and it’s going back to Bungie. The stock should revert to Sony. In fact, I don’t think it can be any other way, as those boilerplate details would have been included in the contract details of the initial stock grant. This makes me doubt the veracity of the unnamed source.
Plus, COBRA would come into play also. I’ve been in a similar situation and health insurance is luckily one of the least scary parts.
Cobra might as well not even exist for most people.
The two layoffs I’ve been through, Cobra was offered as an option and in both cases it was wildly unaffordable. Like…I couldn’t have afforded it even if I still had the job I had just lost, let alone while unemployed.
In both cases I just basically only had the option to cross my fingers and hope I didn’t need healthcare while letting it lapse completely until I found a new job. Thankfully in the first case I was only unemployed about 3 weeks, but the other time, it was about 6 months.
What eventually came through for me was my state’s version of Medicaid in that situation. Basically it was only available to people earning less than XYZ, but any funds you received as aid from the state didn’t count toward that, meaning that unemployment was exempt and as such, my income was zero. Of course there was like an 8 week waiting period and then it took several more weeks for all the paperwork to go through, but eventually it did kick in.
