Why Is NOBODY Talking About the Mass Resignations of Major CEOs?

Something is not right here

The Moirae
DataDrivenInvestor
Published in
5 min readJul 13, 2020

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Image: Unsplash

To date by July 2020, well over 1300 CEOs from massive corporations throughout the world had stepped down from their positions in the preceding twelve months.

Various motivations were cited for the departures. These ranged from personal reasons to a lesser demand for services, and even a positive COVID-19 diagnosis.

The year 2019 marked the largest record in history of multiple CEO’s stepping down from their positions within the same time frame.

The last time the numbers were even close had been as far back as 2002, when executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas first began culminating the data.

And by the start of 2020, it showed no signs of slowing down.

In the month of January alone, over two hundred Chief Executives had vacated their comfortable positions, logged out and cashed in.

Looking at some of the names on the list, we’re not just talking about a few local businesses here either.

Nokia, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, L Brands, LinkedIn, Salesforce, Match, Hulu, Tinder, Credit Suisse, Groupon, Disney, Harley Davidson, Mastercard, Nike, eBay, IBM… you get the picture.

The list goes on and on.

But why?

It’s not uncommon to see top level execs step down during a recession, but the floodgates opened way back in 2019. During this time, many of these companies saw insane stock market highs.

The economy was booming and we were blissfully unaware of corona as anything other than a tasty beer.

This kind of mass exodus didn’t even happen during the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession.

It makes little sense.

For the majority of these high powered executives, they left before the full outbreak of the coronavirus across the USA in March of this year.

I mention the USA specifically because the majority of these companies are originally registered or based there.

Various hypotheses have been cited for the widespread resignations, some that could have legs and some that are reaching to say the least.

I’ve kept to the theories that make the most logical sense as opposed to anything conspiracy related whilst looking into this.

One of the first and most obvious is that these executives were tipped off by friends in ‘Big Chinese Business’ that a virus was about to hit US soil, and hard.

The outbreak of COVID-19 in China was reported as far back as November 2019 and by January, the country was already on lockdown and the economy tanking.

It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that given the power and influence some of these companies have, that their pals in Chinese business were readily warning the big players to get out while the gettin’s good.

This idea holds a lot of weight in my opinion because again, many of these people got out just before the virus hit the economy hard.

Their company stock options were probably cashed out for a pretty penny, whereas if they had waited much longer who knows what financial mess they’d be left to deal with.

Leaving before the full impact of the virus possibly included a nice golden handshake as well, which is common in positions of this kind of elevated status.

Image: Unsplash

From here, the next theories get dark quite quickly and all circle around corruption.

Recently in the press, the massive fast-fashion company BooHoo has been subject to allegations of slavery within their working practices.

The company chief executives are pleading ignorance to the allegations at this point and are investigating privately, but as we know there is generally no smoke without fire.

An undercover Sunday Times reporter was offered a job for BooHoo for just £3.50 per hour in cramped, squalid conditions at one of their factories in Leicester, UK just last month whilst looking into the story.

No social distancing was being observed, and now these factories are purported to be the cause of Leicester having the second largest number of coronavirus cases in the UK at present.

Although BooHoo’s CEOs have not stepped down, I use the story as exhibit A to demonstrate the likely levels of corruption that go on in big business.

So coming nicely back to our list above, Credit Suisse’s CEO Tidjane Thiam resigned on February 6th 2020 after the company was caught using a private investigator to stalk a former staff member.

When a star banker decided to defect to a rival corporation, the company took it upon themselves to stalk previous employee Iqbal Khan, eventually leading to the death of the actual private investigator and a whole heap of negative press.

I honestly couldn’t make this stuff up.

Now up until this point, it’s mainly corporate spying and unsafe labour practices in the mix. But the most alarming rumours (and I must call them that at this point,) are worrisome to say the least.

On 21st December 2017, sitting President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order which authorised the immediate seizure of assets belonging to people and organisations involved in any form of human rights abuse, human trafficking or corruption.

With that in mind, are many of these CEOs leaving before their company is caught up in a human rights scandal?

CEO of L Brands Les Wexner (who owns such retail outlets as Victoria’s Secret) stepped down in February after almost sixty years at the helm. He is the longest standing CEO of any Fortune 500 company.

Is this any coincidence when his vast connections to Jeffrey Epstein have been outed in recent months?

Given the arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell who is apparently ‘ready to name names’ of her and Jeffrey’s co-conspirators in sex trafficking over the years, the rabbit hole could go much deeper than we’ll ever know.

Are the heads of the snakes cutting and running before it’s too late?

At this point there is little firm evidence to prove links to mass human rights violations being performed by these companies, but it’s not something we should take lightly.

The Oxfam charity scandal of 2018, where aid workers were using prostitutes whilst deployed overseas in countries such as Haiti, demonstrates that even the best intended corporations on the surface can be hiding grisly undertones.

Time will tell if any further clues on the mass CEO exodus of 2020 are revealed, but for now I remain suspended in eager curiosity hoping for another breadcrumb to devour.

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