Vishal Garg, the CEO who fired 900 on Zoom, offers to work for $1 a year to reclaim Better after $1.5 billion in losses

Vishal Garg, the CEO who fired 900 on Zoom, offers to work for $1 a year to reclaim Better after $1.5 billion in losses

Laura Boast

Thu, August 20, 2026 at 5:05 PM GMT+3 5 min read

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Vishal Garg has long invoked "the American dream" as the motivation behind Better Home & Finance, known as Better, the online mortgage firm he launched 10 years ago to make mortgages more accessible.

But his own dreams appear to be going up in flames. Garg — who abruptly dismissed 900 employees via Zoom in December 2021 — was himself abruptly fired this month. As Forbes reports, Better's board ousted Garg because under his watch, the business experienced $1.5 billion in losses and its stock price cratered 90%.

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Garg wants his job back and said he would work for $1 a year until the company turns a profit.

In return, he wants five out of eight directors on Better's board to step down. He also wants his replacement — CEO Daniel Lewis — to step aside so Garg can take the helm again.

In an interview on Bloomberg's The Close, and in comments on the interview in LinkedIn, Garg said he had the support of more than 50% of voting shareholders and that the company's allegations were "bubkus," meaning nonsense. He also noted that the company's value has fallen since Lewis took over. (It has, but was already down before Garg left.)

Better's board responded by filing a complaint with the U.S. Southern District of New York stating that Garg lacks sufficient shareholder support to displace directors and that he broke securities laws by "flooding the market with misleading statements."

In the filing, the board criticizes Garg's "scorched-earth campaign" to return to power. Here's a look at his leadership style and how he's changed the mortgage business, for better or worse.

Valuations as volatile as the boss himself

Garg has a reputation for being volatile. He sent out an email to staff calling them "dumb dolphins" who were "embarrassing" him, according to Forbes. Better's complaint alleges that Garg also called employees "mortgage monkeys."

He did apologize for the manner in which he mass-fired 900 people on Zoom — an event one ex-employee told The Daily Beast took just three minutes.

"I failed to show the appropriate amount of respect and appreciation for the individuals who were affected and for their contributions to Better," Garg wrote at the time. "I own the decision to do the layoffs but in communicating it I blundered the execution."

Shortly after, Better's board engaged a law firm to conduct a cultural review.

The review indicated that "certain actions taken by our CEO failed to set a tone at the top that supported a strong culture of internal controls" and that it had become "less effective than others in our industry at capturing potential customers."

Garg — who had seen the mortgage company's value explode to $7.7 billion during the pandemic — was put on leave. He returned in 2022 to lay the groundwork to take the company public, merging with Aurora Acquisition Corp., a shell company set up to raise capital through an initial public offering.

The Securities and Exchange Commission investigated whether Better had violated securities law in the merger. As Forbes reported, nothing came of the investigation, but the probe cost the company reputation and money. There were more layoffs — 7,000 in all between 2021 and 2023.

When Garg finally did take Better public in 2023, with backing from SoftBank, the IPO was a disappointment, with share values dropping 93% on the first day, per Reuters. As CNN reports, the company is worth $300 million today, a 96% drop from its high point.

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Garg believes the company can be profitable again

Garg says the company can be profitable again — if he's put back in the CEO chair, pointing to innovations he led at the company.

While Garg culled human staff, he advanced AI mortgage support. In 2025, Better launched Betsy, an AI voice-based loan assistant available around the clock. The tool helps prepare mortgage applications — and claims to be able to do so at speed, replacing the work of multiple humans.

In collaboration with the cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase, Better launched a crypto mortgage product in which homeowners could use their digital assets as collateral on down payments. It is not the first crypto mortgage product, but it is the first to be backed by Fannie Mae.

"I've been doing this for 10 years, but execution hasn't been perfect," Garg told CNN. "I hope it gets resolved. I think the future still remains very bright for Better."

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This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: Vishal Garg, the CEO who fired 900 on Zoom, offers to work for $1 a year to reclaim Better after $1.5 billion in losses

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