How Vishal Garg, the Indian American Who Once Fired 900 Employees on Zoom, Is Trying to Take Back Better.Com

Vishal Garg — the Indian American founder, chief executive, and most visible face of Better Home & Finance Holding Company, the AI-focused digital mortgage lender he built from nothing into a platform that has provided more than $100 billion in home financing — was fired by his own board on August 3, 2026. The vote was unanimous among all board members except Garg himself.

It was not the first time Garg had generated headlines by the circumstances of his departure from normal executive conduct. He became globally infamous in December 2021 when he fired 900 employees — approximately 15 percent of Better’s workforce at the time — on a Zoom call that was recorded and leaked, telling the assembled workers that they were “dead weight” and that “if you work at a company that’s losing money, L-O-S-E-I-N-G, you know, fighting for your life, that would be us.” The Zoom call made him, briefly, the most recognizable symbol of Silicon Valley’s lack of empathy in corporate culture. He later apologized and was briefly replaced, before returning as CEO.

What followed August 3, 2026 was different in kind. Within days, Garg launched what his opponents would describe, in a 136-page federal lawsuit, as an “illegal, scorched-earth campaign” to replace the board and reclaim the company he founded. What Garg himself would describe as a legitimate exercise of shareholder democracy — the right of a majority owner to hold his board accountable — has since produced two separate lawsuits, a federal court hearing, a “poison pill” shareholder rights plan, a formal consent solicitation, and, as of September 30, Garg’s claim that he has secured the votes to win.

From India to Queens to Wall Street: The Man Behind the Battle

Vishal Garg was born in India and moved to Queens, New York, at the age of seven. He attended Stuyvesant High School — the elite Manhattan public school that requires a competitive entrance exam and has produced a remarkable number of prominent alumni — where he was, by his own account, a driven and ambitious student. He received the Golden Pegleg Award for Outstanding Alumni from Stuyvesant, as his official website vishal-garg.com documented.

He graduated from New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. After graduating, he joined Morgan Stanley in its mergers and acquisitions division as an investment banking analyst — the standard first step for the most ambitious finance graduates of his generation.

He did not stay long. At 21 — while still at Morgan Stanley — he co-founded MyRichUncle.com with his high school classmate Raza Khan, using $30,000 as initial capital, as his official website documented. MyRichUncle became the first online student lender in the United States, and Garg took it public while still in his twenties, according to the startupfundraising.com career profile. At its peak, MyRichUncle was the fourth-largest publicly traded private student loan company in the United States. The company eventually filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2009, as the subprime mortgage crisis rippled through the financial sector.

After MyRichUncle, Garg founded 1/0 Capital, an early-stage investment firm focused on fintech, data science, and consumer products, before founding Better.com in January 2014 in Greater New York City, according to his official website. The founding story involved a personal frustration: Garg came home to find his landlord complaining that his son had colored on the walls, and began looking for a mortgage — only to discover that the process was so broken, so opaque, and so dependent on commissioned loan officers whose incentives did not align with borrowers’ interests, that he decided to build the alternative himself. Better.com set out specifically to remove commissioned loan officers from the mortgage process and replace them with an AI-driven platform.

The company raised more than $1.75 billion in equity capital and is backed by SoftBank, L Catterton, Kleiner Perkins, Goldman Sachs, Ally Bank, American Express, and Citi, as the SEC DFAN14A filing from Garg’s own group confirmed. He received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award, Inman’s 2024 Best of Finance Award, and HousingWire’s Most Influential Mortgage Executive recognition, as his official website documented.

The Board’s Version: Securities Violations, “Scorched Earth,” and a Group Acting in Concert

Better Home & Finance’s August 18, 2026 federal lawsuit — filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York — opened the public phase of the conflict.

Better filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. “Better filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Vishal Garg violated securities rules by coordinating shareholders without timely disclosures and by soliciting support without required definitive filings,” the company announced via a Business Wire press release.

Better’s stock is down nearly 60% since Garg’s ouster, with large stockholders rebelling against the board’s actions and demanding his return.

Better filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court alleging that Garg violated Section 13(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 by organizing a group of shareholders to act in concert without timely disclosure of the group’s formation, membership, arrangements and shareholdings. Better said it had “incontrovertible evidence” that Garg was not acting alone.

The lawsuit quoted from text messages included in the complaint. “Within days of his removal, Garg assembled a group of shareholders to act together to carry out his self-serving agenda of removing the majority of the duly constituted Board, replacing those directors with hand-picked successors, and reinstalling him as CEO,” the lawsuit states.

In text messages included in the lawsuit, Garg described the desired outcome as replacing the board, reinstalling him as CEO and eventually moving him into a product and innovation role.

Better sought declaratory and injunctive relief — including a court order voiding consents already obtained by Garg’s group and compelling corrective SEC filings, as HousingWire confirmed.

Garg’s Version: “Lies and Manipulation,” a Poison Pill, and a Hostile Takeover

Garg did not wait to respond. On August 25 — one week after Better sued him — he filed his own lawsuit in Delaware Chancery Court, the jurisdiction with the most established body of corporate governance law in the United States.

Founder Vishal Garg has sued Better Home & Finance Holding Co., interim CEO Daniel Lewis and six fellow board members, alleging they illegally entrenched themselves after ousting him as CEO.

Garg claims the board used “lies and manipulation” to fire him and adopted a “poison pill” to illegally entrench themselves and thwart shareholder voting rights. Garg alleges that “through lies and manipulation,” activist hedge fund manager Lewis, founder of Orange Capital, “maneuvered his way” onto Better’s board on July 27, then convinced the board to terminate Garg as CEO without notice or cause on Aug. 3.

According to the complaint, Better’s stock is down nearly 60% since Garg’s ouster, with large stockholders rebelling against the board’s actions and demanding his return.

The “poison pill” — formally known as a shareholder rights plan — is a defensive mechanism companies adopt to make hostile takeovers more expensive by diluting the value of shares if any single shareholder acquires above a trigger threshold. Garg’s Delaware complaint argued the pill was adopted specifically to prevent shareholders from exercising their legitimate voting rights in support of his consent solicitation, as HousingWire confirmed.

In a Globe Newswire press release filed with the SEC on August 25, Garg’s camp also pointed to board contradictions revealed in screenshots of text messages between Garg and board members that, Garg argued, showed mixed messaging following his removal and undermined Better’s public narrative about why he was fired.

The Consent Solicitation: Green Cards, an October Deadline, and Claimed Victory

Running parallel to the litigation was Garg’s formal consent solicitation — a mechanism under Delaware corporate law that allows shareholders to act without a formal shareholder meeting by submitting written consents. Garg’s stated goal was to remove five directors — interim CEO Daniel Lewis, Harit Talwar, Arnaud Massenet, Bhaskar Menon, and Prabhu Narasimhan — and replace them with his own chosen candidates.

In a September 14 filing with the SEC, the Garg Group filed consent materials explaining why Better shareholders should vote to oust what it called “renegade board members” after share price and market cap had “plummeted” under the new leadership’s tenure. The presentation contrasted Better’s performance under Garg with its performance since his August 3 removal.

By September 21, the Garg Group reported momentum. The Garg Group said that shareholders representing more than 30 percent of Better’s voting power had already cast written consents in favor of its proposals to remove the five directors, coming just over two weeks after the formal solicitation launched. The Garg Group urged all shareholders to sign, date and return the “GREEN CONSENT CARD” in favor of the proposals, with a betrvote.com website established for the effort.

On September 30, Garg claimed the solicitation had succeeded.

Vishal Garg says his shareholder group secured written consents representing more than 51 percent of Better’s voting power, a claim disclosed in a September 30 filing. “Vishal Garg has been vindicated,” a statement from his group read.

Better declined Inman’s request for comment on Garg’s claim of victory. Better had disputed Garg’s support claims as recently as September 25.

Two days later, Better announced an investigation into allegations that Garg had sought to offer company interests or benefits to former employees who are shareholders in return for consents supporting his effort to replace the board. Garg has disputed Better’s broader allegations throughout the board fight.

The Federal Courtroom: A Judge Weighs a Temporary Restraining Order

As the consent solicitation neared its conclusion, the federal litigation reached an early critical hearing. Vishal Garg and Better Home & Finance squared off before a federal judge as the sides’ boardroom battle reached a major early hurdle. Judge Garnett on Wednesday afternoon listened to Better’s motion for a temporary restraining order on Garg to stop his shareholder rally.

Garg suggested his updated SEC filings rendered Better’s motions to block his solicitations moot. Better is also seeking a preliminary injunction on Garg on top of a potential temporary restraining order, although Judge Garnett was only weighing the TRO. Garg in court filings argued that the injunction would block aggrieved shareholders from taking action against Better’s board.

The outcome of the TRO motion — and the status of the Delaware Chancery Court case, Better’s federal lawsuit, and the consent solicitation’s disputed results — remained unresolved as of the filing of this story. The consent count Better acknowledges has not been publicly confirmed, and Better has announced an investigation into the circumstances under which some of those consents were obtained.

What Comes Next: A Company Waiting for Its Own Resolution

The man who once fired 900 employees on a Zoom call — a moment so brutally public that it became a cultural shorthand for tech-sector heartlessness — has now spent two months on the other side of the power equation, organizing shareholders, filing lawsuits, and arguing that the people who fired him are the ones who betrayed the company’s stakeholders.

Whether the courts, the consent count, and the shareholder vote ultimately return him to the CEO’s chair is a question whose answer is still being written in simultaneous proceedings in federal court in New York and the Court of Chancery in Delaware.