November 19th 2023.
It's a widely held belief that the CEO of any organisation is the most pampered position, however, recent reports may give you a different perspective. According to findings by Challenger, Grey & Christmas, a Chicago-based global outplacement firm, CEO positions are among the most precarious positions in the world.
In 2022, 969 CEOs resigned or were laid off. This year, the number has drastically risen to 1,425, which is a 49% increase in just the first nine months.
One of the most notable CEOs who was either fired or quit is Steve Jobs. He was the co-founder and CEO of Apple, a company he built himself at the young age of 21. After a power struggle with then-CEO John Sculley, Jobs was publicly ousted from the company. Reflecting on the event during his Stanford University graduation speech, Jobs said, “What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.”
Ankiti Bose, co-founder and CEO of Singapore based Zilingo, was sacked in 2022 for financial irregularities. Reports say that she increased her salary ten times without board approval and made USD 10 million worth of unexplained payments to various vendors.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and the developer of the AI chatbot ChatGPT, was recently sacked. The company’s board released a statement that they “no longer have confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.” Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati replaced Altman as interim CEO and will search for a permanent successor.
Elon Musk sacked senior Twitter executives within minutes of taking control. Parag Agrawal, the CEO of the company, was the first to depart.
Phaneesh Murthy, President and CEO of IT firm iGate, was fired in 2013 for violating company policy by failing to report a relationship with a co-worker.
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of microblogging startup Twitter, was sacked by the board of directors in 2008 due to his work attitude.
In 2011, Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz was fired. She joined the company when Google was dominating the search industry, but was let go after two and a half years.
Peter Chou, CEO of HTC, was suddenly sacked in March 2015 because the company’s smartphones failed to connect with buyers.
Gianfranco Lanci, CEO of the Taiwanese computer company Acer, resigned in April 2011 due to differences with the board of directors.
Girish Paranjpe and Suresh Vaswani, joint CEOs of Wipro, resigned in January 2011 after the company failed to meet analyst expectations.
Stephen Elop, former Microsoft CEO, quit the company to join Nokia. He struggled to make the Lumia smartphones popular and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced his retirement.
Mark Hurd, HP CEO, was asked to leave in August 2010 when an outside contractor accused him of sexual harassment. Although an internal inquiry found him to be innocent, he had submitted fake expense reports which cost HP billions of dollars in stock value.
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