A former Better Home & Finance CEO who laid off nearly 1,000 employees right before Christmas 2021 is now upset that he too has been axed.
Former Better Home & Finance CEO Vishal Garg told CNN that he was fired on Aug. 3 when the board voted to replace him with Daniel Lewis. The termination came about five years after Garg laid off 900 people in an online conference call just days prior to Christmas 2021.
“If you’re on this call, you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off,” he said on the call. “Your employment here is terminated effective immediately.”
Listen:
The Christmas season terminations came as a shock to the affected employees.
“I thought I was safe,” a former employee told NBC News at the time. “I had perfect reviews and thought I was an integral part of the team. It’s a bummer, because I know I worked really hard to help build up that company, and it looks like I just wasted my time.”
The terminations also spurred anger, prompting Garg to issue an apology.
“I want to apologize for the way I handled the layoffs last week,” he wrote in an internal letter. “I failed to show the appropriate amount of respect and appreciation for the individuals who were affected and for their contributions to Better.”
“I realize that the way I communicated this news made a difficult situation worse. I am deeply sorry and am committed to learning from this situation and doing more to be the leader that you expect me to be,” he added.
After the terminations, the company floundered for years courtesy of first a whistleblower investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, in addition to a rapid drop in sales and stockholder value.
“During the pandemic-fueled refinancing boom when mortgage rates were below 3%, the company held an $8 billion valuation,” according to CNN. “Today, with an imploded refi business and rates closing in on 7%, the AI mortgage company’s market value stands at just $300 million.”
Years later, Garg has been given the axe, right as the company is on the verge of a turnaround that he claims he engineered. This year, for example, the company is estimated to earn $200 million in sales, up by $130 million from the paltry $70 million that was made in 2023.
Garg reportedly bounced the company back by training AI models to quickly and efficiently process mortgages, thus bypassing the old-fashioned way of having several people process them over the course of days.
He also had Better Home & Finance partner with Neo Home Loans. This led to a doubling of productivity and a reduction of costs. This partnership led to even more partnerships with Intuit, Coinbase, and OpenAI.
Garg says all this happened because of him.
“We’re winning. We’ve tripled loan volume. We’re close to profitability,” he boasted. “We were at the 5-yard line after taking the ball all the way down the field from the other side.”
So why was he ousted? He blames his replacement, Daniel Lewis, for convincing the company’s board that he hadn’t pushed hard enough. The irony is that Lewis originally approached Garg months ago with ideas on how to improve the company.
“His thoughts about cost savings were good,” Garg admitted to CNN. “His ideas about innovation were not. It’s so much easier when we’re this close for someone to come in and say that they could have done better.”
Eventually, Lewis was brought onto the board on July 27. Within a week, he’d convinced the board to drop Garg.
“It’s not about me,” Garg alleged to CNN. “I care about delivering savings to people and helping them live the American Dream. So when shareholders said, ‘You need to take a back seat,’ I complied.”
So what’s his beef?
Garg believes that Lewis pulled one over on him.
“I suspect he always wanted to become CEO,” Garg said to CNN. “The board made a mistake.”
He’s been squabbling with Lewis on social media ever since his termination:
My response to the dumb allegations in the press release @danielsethlewis sent out WITHOUT board authorization. #BUBKUS. Yeah that’s Boy Scout for FAKE NEWS. Sacre bleu Daniel, I think the French air is getting to you. Is that why you hired a $400k PR firm with the companies…
— Vishal Garg (@vishal_better) August 15, 2026
According to CNN, he’s hired a high-powered attorney who this Monday sent a letter to Better’s board demanding he be reinstated.
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V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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