On 1 December 2021, Vishal Garg opened a video call with roughly 900 of his own employees and told them, within the first few sentences, that their jobs were gone. The call ran about three minutes. Garg explained that the market had changed and that productivity was down. He said he did not want to be doing this. He mentioned that he had done it once before in his career, and that he had cried that time. This time, he said, he hoped to be stronger. Vishal Garg has spent the years since insisting that people treat him more fairly than that.
Stealing From the Company
Two days after the call, Garg went further. Posting under the username “uneducated” on the anonymous professional network Blind, he wrote that a large share of the people he had just fired had been coasting on the clock, and that they “were stealing from you and stealing from our customers.” He later confirmed to Fortune that he had written it and that he stood by the sentiment, even if the phrasing could have been gentler.
That was the pattern Garg set for himself early: when something went wrong at Better.com, the fault sat with the people beneath him, and he was comfortable putting a name to that fault while the story was still breaking. He apologised, eventually, for how badly he had handled the delivery, though the accusation underneath it was one he stood behind.
Five Years Later, the Board Did the Same Thing to Him
On 3 August 2026, Better’s board removed Garg as chief executive. The move came a week after hedge fund manager Daniel Lewis had joined the board, on 27 July. Within days, Lewis had persuaded the rest of the directors to replace Garg with himself, on an interim basis.
Garg was blindsided, and he did not hide it. He told CNN that Lewis “hoodwinked me”, praising the company’s strategy in public while working the board in private. He said he suspected Lewis had wanted the job from the start. Lewis responded publicly that the company would not exist without Garg’s contribution, a nod of respect that arrived only after the board had already voted him out. What Garg did not say, in that interview or any since, is that this is roughly what 900 people went through with him, five years earlier, on a Wednesday morning: blindsided by a decision they had no part in, then told afterwards it had been regrettable but necessary.
The board had a real financial case, too. Better’s valuation had fallen from around $8 billion at the height of the pandemic refinancing boom to roughly $300 million by the time Garg was removed, as mortgage rates climbed back toward 7 percent and the business he had built for speed struggled to adjust. Whether that decline justified how quickly Lewis moved is a separate question from whether it happened at all. It happened.
The Numbers Didn’t Add Up Either
Garg pushed back immediately. He wrote to the board demanding the directors resign, and he began soliciting other shareholders to back him. By the middle of August, he was telling reporters he had already secured support from more than half of Better’s voting power.
He hadn’t, not even close. In an amended filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Garg’s own camp acknowledged that the written consents collected by 17 August fell short of a majority. The explanation offered was an “administrative error,” tied to information supplied by Better’s in-house counsel. Better’s subsequent lawsuit against him, filed in the Southern District of New York, called the whole effort a “scorched-earth campaign” and accused him of making false and misleading statements to shareholders before he had filed the paperwork required to solicit their support at all.
It is a strange position for Garg to be defending, given his own history. In 2021 he judged 900 people’s competence down to the hour, based on call logs and clock-in times, and made that judgement public. In 2026, when his own vote count came up short, the explanation was somebody else’s paperwork.
Asking for the Fairness He Never Gave
Garg’s response has not stopped at defence. On 25 August he sued Better, Lewis and the board in the Delaware Court of Chancery, arguing that the company’s newly adopted shareholder rights plan, a poison pill designed to block a takeover, had been put in place for “pretextual reasons” meant to stop shareholders from exercising their own voting rights. His filings describe the current board as illegitimate and Lewis as a director who effectively talked his way into the chief executive’s chair.
A federal judge sided with him on 2 September, declining to block his shareholder campaign, after Better’s own lawyers conceded in a Delaware hearing that the poison pill did not actually prevent him from soliciting support the way he had. Days later, Garg’s group filed formally with the SEC to remove five of Better’s directors, and put out a statement reassuring shareholders they could vote for him “with confidence and certainty.”
Confidence and certainty were not what Garg offered the people on that Zoom call in 2021. What he is asking of Better’s board now is basically what 900 employees asked of him and never got: some warning, and a process that wasn’t already decided before it started. He does not appear to have noticed the resemblance. A man who can spot unfairness instantly the second it points at him, and never once before, is the real story here.
Sources
National Mortgage Professional
