15+ CEOs who ran their companies into the ground: '75% of the employees had quit... because paychecks kept bouncing'

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Dec 24, 2025 11:00 AM EST

The effect that leadership has on a company doesn't go unnoticed by those most impacted by it: the employees themselves. 

Companies transform under different leadership. Hirings and firings might become more frequent. Bosses can implement free lunches or hybrid work schedules… or they can take away these thing that were previously given as rewards. If you've ever been in this type of situation, you know just how much power one exec can have. They can take a company that runs perfectly well, and gut it within a matter of months. 

A lot of times, when new CEOs get into position, they want to flex their newfound power over their employees. For whatever reason, they often fire the most critical people in the organization. They'll look at an employee who's been there for 2 decades, who holds critical company knowledge, and decide that they're making too much money. Goodbye! That employee leaves forever, taking that crucial knowledge along with them. And now, the bosses are left trying to replace that guy with a couple of interns who don't know anything about the industry, or with a highly-paid contractor who costs more than the original guy ever did. 

Add as a preferred
source on Google
Advertisement

  • When a CEO guts a company, there's no coming back from it. When the cost-cutting measures cut all the costs, leaving no money for the actual employees who make the place run smoothly, it's just a downward slope into bankruptcy. Though I'm not sure why it's a legitimate thing, it's both legal and seemingly encouraged for CEOs to take massive salaries, even if it undercuts the actual workers who are making the company's income. Then, after a few years, that CEO can walk away, having fully gutted the company. They leave behind a shell of a workplace… but great news, y'all! That one CEO got like, millions of dollars by destroying jobs. Isn't that so awesome? Isn't that so super great? Don't we all love how a CEO can oust dozens of workers so that they can make millions, and they're encouraged to leave the workspace worse than how they found it? While they're taking lavish vacations and living the easy life, their workers are struggling. There's really no happy ending when the wrong person takes over. 

    Yeah, I don't think so either. But it's the way of the world, at least for now. You can check out a bunch of stories below, all told by employees who watched in shock as new management mangled their companies. 

  • 01

    'What's the fastest way you've seen a CEO ruin a company?'

    Young man in tie holds cell phone to his ear while sitting at office desk and smiling
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • 02
    Seldarin A construction company near me was pulling $100-$200 million in revenue every year and growing constantly, then the owner died and his fratbro failson was handed the reins. Within a month a quarter the employees had either been fired or quit. After four months the rental
    via u/Seldarin
  • 03
    companies were showing up and repoing lifts and cranes/carrydecks in the middle of the day because they weren't being paid. Almost 3/4ths of the employees had quit by this point because paychecks kept bouncing. Before six months had passed, what was left was sold for a pittance to another company that just wanted what was left of the maintenance contracts.
    via u/Seldarin
  • 04
    So like six months to bomb the company he'd been groomed to take over since he was a teenager to rubble and piss on the ashes.
    via u/Seldarin
  • 05
    sandtomyneck Took a job at a tech startup in the 90s with the promise of fast growth and opportunity. Things really took off in the second year and we opened up several more branches in different states while I was promoted to production manager. The company hired a young CEO who was only a couple of years older
    via u/sandtomyneck
  • 06
    than me. Sometimes he would stay at our location for a couple of weeks at a time and he started driving really nice sports cars to work. When he would leave to other cities he would leave his cars in the parking lot of our branch. There were corvettes, porsches, audis, and more.
    via u/sandtomyneck
  • 07
    After the second year of promising growth, the business suddenly stopped while the owners visited and yelled at the entire crew for not managing our money and told us that they were in debt by over a million dollars. We were all given the task of dismantling the equipment and preparing it to be sold and shipped before being let go.
    via u/sandtomyneck
  • 08
    On our last day when the building was empty we all noticed that the row of sports cars was still there and the owner had placed for sale signs on them. It turned out that they were all bought as company vehicles and the CEO had done this at each business location. We all still were yelled at in a furious rage by this CEO and owner for not being responsible people.
    via u/sandtomyneck
  • 09
    Sochitelya He tried to run a nonprofit library wholesaler like a car dealership. Because he was a car dealership guy who knew fuck-all about libraries. Most of the senior staff retired and he fired the rest. Then implemented policies. that treated us all like children, such as having to
    via u/Sochitelya
  • 10
    put our phones in a box at the front office when we got into work in the morning. Hired a bunch of rando high level positions who also knew fuck-all about libraries. Then he talked some shit about people who 'couldn't handle change' because they'd quit. Refused to allow us to order inventory so libraries couldn't get extra
    via u/Sochitelya
  • 11
    copies when a book unexpectedly blew up. Anyway, I quit when I was handed a coworker's entire job with no extra compensation (or, you know, choice in the matter) and the 60+ year old company was dead within about a year, year and a half of him becoming CEO.
    via u/Sochitelya
  • 12
    Mo... GoBear in Asia. The company got funded 200M euro in 5 years. Best funded company in SE Asia at the time. Got a new CEO who fired every single board member member of the executive team that didn't agree with him. Kept all the yessir C-level and directors. In two years, the company went down the drain and closed. At its peak, it had
    via u/MostlyInfuriated
  • 13
    over 200 employees. The best part of it, he made the company buy a money- lending business in the Philippines... that he owned. So he pocketed whatever money the company had left. and then shut it down.
    via u/MostlyInfuriated
  • 14
    Woman in gray pants and suit jacket leans on desk and looks forward confidently in office setting
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • 15
    FrankAdamGabe A CIO came in and started his tenure off with telling everyone his second week there on a Friday that starting Monday, there was absolutely no wfh. Nada. Zilch. No excuses. HR got involved and made it even clearer. This was before Covid and it was wfh 3 days/week. Some people had moved 2+ hours
    via u/FrankAdamGabe
  • 16
    away, would come in to town Monday morning, stay the night, work Tuesday, and go home to work until the next Monday. Well in IT it's not very prudent to not have your guys be able to hop on to fix a problem. So the CIO would try to make the exemption in special cases and no one would budge. So the few times some people went in, a 10m fix would run them 3-
    via u/FrankAdamGabe
  • 17
    4 hours. This CIO also had a knack of yelling at people in public and just being a huge dumbfuck and not knowledgeable about anything. He took a 15 year secretary and made her an enterprise backend developer... that she never wanted. He took an amazing developer and assigned them to 1 of 58 sites for a pet project where we could
    via u/FrankAdamGabe
  • 18
    start pulling data without the site's permission. The site told them to fuck off when they realized what was going on after a few months. The thinly spread developer led to a site getting hacked and held for ransom, literally. And that's just before I left. In 2 years the place had a 50%+ turnover. The old timers who wrote the old ass code keeping the place
    via u/FrankAdamGabe
  • 19
    running took early retirement. Middle careers like myself fucked off. Everyone else was just new looking for experience or holding on for early retirement. The place cratered. From some colleagues who stayed I heard people were often crying in the hallways. They had to hire a moral boosting position that did jack shit. Federal
    via u/FrankAdamGabe
  • 20
    requirements were falling through left and right and the agency was getting sanctioned repeatedly. Eventually the board wiped out the entire top brass of about 10 people (in a 200 person agency). But the damage was done and to this day shit still hasn't recovered. I know people who took 40k pay cuts for other jobs just to get tf out of that place.
    via u/FrankAdamGabe
  • 21
    Different_Boot762 probably when a ceo comes in and tries to "cut costs" by laying off the people who actually know how to run the business. like, they save money short term but lose all the talent and experience, and the whole thing falls apart. also, when they make some wild pivot into a market they don't understand-instant disaster.
    via u/Different_Boot762
  • 22
    ThisIsMyCouchAc... Ruin is a strong word - but it wasn't good. Small company wanted to be bigger and have bigger customers. Owners hired a CEO with experience in that.
    via u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount
  • 23
    CEO did classic corporate CEO shit. Which didn't jive well because the company had been very employee- first. Very transparent. A good place to work. Took about 18 months and they fired the guy and the owners stepped back in.
    via u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount
  • 24
    ConstantinopleFett I'll have to be vague but a startup I worked for had some initial success and profit and the CEO responded by deciding to go and "disrupt" more industries and invest all of our profits into that, while diverting resources from our thing that actually made money. We were spread thin and failed.
    via u/ConstantinopleFett
  • 25
    SeeMarkFly My personal experience was a new manager that stopped all overtime. I was trying to keep customers happy and he was not for it. The overtime is an indication that we needed more people. He couldn't see it. I left and they folded.
    via u/SeeMarkFly
  • 26
    underwear11 My dad spent 35 years starting and building his business. Hugely profitable by the end and a place people wanted to work. He wanted to retire, so he sold it. Within 3 months almost everyone had left because they were being treated like crap to maximize profits. 6 months in, during the peak
    via u/underwear11
  • 27
    season when my dad would normally have to turn away work, they had employees without work to do. 1 year from purchase and they closed the business. I couldn't believe how quickly it could collapse.
    via u/underwear11
  • 28
    zenos_dog Flew around the country making sales and collecting his quarterly bonuses. Turns out that in a year he hadn't made a single sale. Worse, the engineer ps thought we had a product that customers wanted.
    via u/zenos_dog
  • 29
    Dro... Not CEO but President and especially Vice president of the company. BIG MOTOR. President of the company placed his son as vice president and profits skyrocketed, but only because as it turned out, new vice president forced dealerships to commit
    via u/Drogovich
  • 30
    insurance fraud, regular fraud, abused and humiliated the staff, killed all the plant life around dealership. After it got out, reputation of the company was completely destroyed, despite them being the biggest and most trusted dealership before that.
    via u/Drogovich
  • 31
    Anonymous4mysa... He fired the guy who owned almost all the patents to the products the company produced.
    via u/Anonymous4mysake
  • 32
    Timinime New CEO was told to cut costs, and commenced the most aggressive cost cutting program ever seen in our companies history. So much so we started haemorrhaging revenue, which lead him to cut costs even more aggressively. In the space of 2 years we'd lost a heap of market share, we went from being a very
    via u/Timinime
  • 33
    profitable company to one with a sharp drop in ROE, and by the time he was fired (for doing his business manager in his office), the business needed substantial investment to bring all its systems back up to standard and hire good staff again. Market share never recovered, and the business is still worse off than when he started a decade ago.
    via u/Timinime
  • 34
    Elrond_Cupboard_ I recently saw a company ruin a CEO. He denied, couldn't defend, and then he was deposed.
    via u/Elrond_Cupboard_
  • 35
    Suspicious_Horne... Good old "Big Jim" Came in on the promise to shareholders he would double the profits in less than a year. And that he did. First: Forced "retirements" for anyone there over 15 years. Get rid of those high salaries. (and institutionalized knowledge, but who cares about that)
    via u/Suspicious_Hornet_77
  • 36
    Second: Cancel all capital projects. Why build out when customers are kinda forced to buy from us anyway? Third: RTO all around! Even said in a teams meeting ( from his comfy home office of course) "If you don't like it, leave."
    via u/Suspicious_Hornet_77
  • 37
    35% of us left. Company is barely hanging on and it's well known they are positioning themselves to get sold.
    via u/Suspicious_Hornet_77

Want More? Follow Us and Add Us as a Preferred Source on Google.

Tags

workplace-stories bosses work ceo
Scroll Down For The Next Article