SKYPE SCANDAL: Here's How Big Bad Private-Equity Firm Silver Lake Sees The Situation
Over the past week, a minor scandal has emerged in Silicon Valley over the way a bunch of senior Skype executives were treated after the company agreed to be acquired by Microsoft for $9 billion. The first report was that the executives had been fired before the deal closed to save a bit of payout money for Skype's investors, namely private equity firm Silver Lake. This story was quickly debunked, or at least muted, when it emerged that the firings were part of a re-organization by Skype's relatively new CEO Tony Bates and that the fired executives had, in fact, received the stock and cash compensation they had earned to date (if not what they would have earned had they stayed on for several more years). But then another ex-Skype executive, Yee Lee, wrote an essay about how he had been reamed by "a bunch of rat bastards" at Silver Lake. And the scandal caught fire again. Lee's main complaint was that when he voluntarily resigned from Skype, he thought he had mad...