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Did you ever notice that enormous success is sometimes followed or accompanied by enormous heartache? That must be the case for the enormously successful CEO of retail giant Best Buy. It’s not a Michigan case but the principles are the same. His name is Hubert Joly and he recently led Best Buy to a resurgence that has seen Best Buy’s stock triple in value. But the heartache is in his personal life where he has had to shell out a divorce settlement which necessitated selling a large chunk of his stock to satisfy the provisions of a property division agreement.
Mr. Joly apparently sold some 20 percent of his stock in Best Buy to pay off his ex-spouse. The company issued a statement assuring the public that the sell-off had nothing to do with business matters but was necessary to for the property division agreement in the divorce. Joly sold a hefty 451,153 shares in the company, which totaled a $16.7 million.
He had to pay out $6.3 million to exercise stock options, leaving him with $10 million to hand over to his ex-wife. Joly’s leadership of Best Buy has been so phenomenal that he should be able to earn back the $16.7 million soon enough. The details of the agreement with the ex-spouse were not reported or immediately available. It’s unknown what other assets figured into the property division or what assets the parties owned together as marital property.
However, in terms of some of the other blockbuster divorce settlements reported this year, this one seems modest. A mere $10 million does not seem to raise eyebrows in comparison, for example, to the massive amounts, sometimes in the billions, involved in the Rupert Murdoch divorces or even in many settlements of Hollywood celebrities. Michigan residents and others should not be deceived because the $10 million may be only one small slice of the property division, which could also include various assets consisting of marital property distributed in kind.
Source: webpronews.com, Best Buy CEO Dumps Stake To Pay For Divorce, Matt Spencer, Sept. 11, 2013