Hello and welcome to the better does worse edition of Slate Money, your guide to the Business and Finance News of the week.

I'm Felix Salmon of Axios.

I'm joined by Emily Peck of Fundrise. Hello, hello.

By Stacey Marie Ishmael of Bloomberg.

Hello.

And in this here, Sheena Roth produced show, we are going to talk about better, which is actually a mortgage company and their atrocious way of laying people off.

We're going to have a whole conversation about, is there a good way of laying people off in firings and all of that kind of thing?

In a context, we have to say, of firings and layoffs being basically less common and virtually non-existent these days. We are going to talk about 15-minute grocery delivery.

It's a thing now. Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? We will work that one out. We are going to

talk about voting and whether you need to be a citizen to be able to do it we have a slate plus about

inflation it's all coming up on slate money so let's start by talking about better.com the place

that does everything better worse stacey what is better dot com the place that does everything better worse stacey what is better dot com and what did they do worse well i can start with what

they did worse which is the reason that any of us are talking about better dot com is because

their CEO a person in vichal garg laid off 900 employees by Zoom in, you know,

being laid off by Zoom, I guess is 2021, but the way that he did it was remarkable.

And it really has once again triggered a conversation, including from his own, you know,

board around, do we have to treat employees like the

worst of humanity and not at all respect what it is that they are going through?

And his board seems to have basically fired him or like suspended him or something?

He's on leave. He's on leave. Okay. And, you know, and it's, is this a bit like when those people, like, when those TV hosts take a long scheduled holiday that they hadn't told anyone about? What possible TV host could we be thinking of? Um, so this, you know, like Better Notcom is like a mortgage company, right? They're not, they're not saving the world. They're providing mortgage financing. And the idea that the way you can talk to employees is like this is something that I'm always baffled by. Like what is it about becoming a CEO that turns you into the type of person

that thinks everybody else is not a human being? The thing which really struck me about the

clip was when he basically says, this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. And then he says,

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