News.com: Ex-Webvan CEO to collect $375,000 yearly. Under the terms of his retirement package, Shaheen will receive 50 percent of his base salary and target bonus for the rest of his life. The payments will continue to be sent to Shaheen’s wife should he die before her, Grebey said.
This deal will get a lot of press as an example of the worst dot-com ripoffs. It does qualify as an outrageous deal.
But it pales next to the real ripoffs that took place during the dot-con mania of the past several years. The investors who were conned — and who conned themselves — into buying beyond-speculative stocks lost trillions of dollars. That’s millions of millions.
The venture capitalists and investment bankers must have snickered as they printed their free money, having offloaded all risk to the public markets. They must have enjoyed the spectacle. Sure, they sold to a willing market. But they must have known they were ripping people off.
You want an outrage. That’s the bigger one.