Part of the 1:1 meeting basis is to address any concerns and address return of assets or information.

In the Before Times, there might be a group meeting, that would typically be for a department or site. It would be followed by a 1:1 with a manager (whomever is left standing in the chain of command), or (fairly frequently) with an outsourced consultant (see the film Up in the Air for reasonably accurate depiction of this).

Better did ... Worse.

> I think it was a good call for the CEO to do it instead of outsourcing to HR or a COO.

There was actually a movie about these outsourced "downziser" organizations/consultants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_in_the_Air_(2009_film)

Yes, but even there the consultant made a point about making the transition as smooth for the fired person as possible. The whole point was not to stir up negative emotions, which by their very nature are unpredictable.

Sure, but the client still pays the consultant for economic reasons: soften the emotional blow to the employee being let go in order to soften the reputation blow to the company. If the employer does not care for reputation (or, what seems more likely in this case, key persons might actually like that particular type of reputation), why would they pay?

Office Space, anyone?

Doing this hierarchically is already a solved issue:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Joz-tAsJ6as

Taking the slings and arrows for it by entirely protecting himself with a one way call?

Nice meme

"As your manager, I'm sad to tell you this, but you are fired. But so am I! It's not you, it's the company."

Counterpoint : this is going viral. The aftermath of that is going to be hard to measure in simple terms.

While true, you could do it in waves - task low level managers to inform their directs, then task the senior managers to inform the middle managers, and so on...

That's how you make all your most hireable employees leave ship first. If you want to retain some those are usually the ones you'd want to keep.