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I had one guy that got obsessed with crypto and was doing crypto trading instead of his work...I think we are all very obviously not at all talking
about the kind of situation you describe.
I left a company a little over a decade ago where the CEO and CTO (both co-founders) were lying to us about the company's situation for the better part of a year (which was longer than half the company had been employed there). I fortunately haven't had the chance to run into them since then, but I would absolutely give them the cold shoulder if I did. And that's because of what they did. I put in 80-hour weeks (including many weekends)[0] for over a year at that place, and they repaid me with a middling salary and worthless equity (after all common stock got wiped out less than a year later when the company got sold to one of the investors for peanuts and scraps).
Anyway, the one "nice" thing I can say about that CTO is that after they had a layoff (half the company), and I didn't get laid off, I went to the CTO and volunteered, and he let me go with the 4-week layoff severance package, which gave me a much-needed month off while I found another job.
(Speaking of startup equity, I'm just glad I wasn't quite out of college during the original dot-com crash, when colleagues I would meet a few years later ended up underwater on the loans they were encouraged to take out in order to exercise their company stock options. I can totally imagine wide-eyed 22-year-old me falling for a garbage scheme like that.)
> People can be very irrational and will look to blame someone in charge when bad things happen.
And sometimes blaming the person in charge is correct and rational.
[0] All stuff I will never again do for any company after that experience...