I'm not disagreeing at all, and I don't know the details in this case, but it's entirely possible to be a billionaire on paper and be _wildly_ incapable of paying salaries to 900 people. 900 x ~150,000 = 135,000,000. If the company was losing 100M a year during the next valuation moment, it's very possible this CEO would no longer be even close to being a billionaire. Cash in hand and valuation are very different things.

Again, not excusing any of this, the video was extremely cringe and I can't believe he went with "for those of you in the US, we'll be doing the legal minimum, for everyone else, sorry!", but as someone who is "worth" almost a million dollars, and who cannot afford to hire even a single person, it's not always so simple.

All that said, 900 * (150000 / 12) == 11250000, so I have a hard time imagining it wouldn't have been worth 1M for a fairly well known tech company with loads of funding to avoid this horrific press and karma.

This is the type of stuff that breaks people. Awful company, I hope the bad press eradicates them, and the ceo loses everything.