Video: Spanx CEO Gives Employees $10,000 Checks, Plane Tickets After Company Value Reaches $1.2 Billion

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Spanx founder Sara Blakely telling her office employees they're getting a bonus and women crying

Photo via @sarablakely/Instagram

October 26, 2021, 2:41 pm

A billionaire CEO reportedly gave $10,000 bonuses to each of her 500 office employees as well as first class plane tickets to any location in the world after a deal with another company sent the worth of Spanx up to $1.2 billion. The company, which makes shapewear garments to squish people into shapes considered more pleasing by our weird society, was sold to a private equity firm by CEO Sara Blakely, who claims to have started the company with just $5,000 earned by selling fax machines door-to-door.

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We can assume none of these bonuses went to the underpaid and sometimes worked-to-death warehouse workers who pack and ship Spanx products or the retail workers who ring them up, without whom the business never could have existed. Still, Blakely is being compared favorably to CEOs like Jeff Bezos who widely exploit and fight to continue exploiting their bottle-peeing workers without ever even rewarding his office workers, who also hate their jobs but at least get to sit down.

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Blakely threw her office workers a nice party after selling a majority stake in Spanx to Blackstone Inc., the massive “investment management” company that has faced criticism for buying up homes en masse during the 2007-2008 housing market crisis that left millions homeless. Their massive rent hikes and aggressive eviction tactics earned Blackstone an official condemnation from the U.N. In both 2018 and 2019, the corporation settled lawsuits over their practice of handing over Motel 6 guest lists to ICE without being given a warrant, leading to many deportations.

Blackstone has also been accused of worsening the growing climate change crisis by funding companies that have been systematically destroying the Amazon rainforest.

Anyway, Blakely is now one of the first women in the U.S. to become a billionaire and 500 people get a nice plane trip during a pandemic and some extra spending money. The cash bonuses add up to $5 million, or less than half of a percent of what the company is now worth.

“This marks a moment for female entrepreneurs,” she said.

It is true that wealthy women have a harder time getting money for their corporations than men do, with just 2.3 percent of venture capital money going to the ladies in 2020. Blakely has argued that her company’s success helps women everywhere because it’s run by a woman, staffed by a lot of women, and the product is generally meant to be sold to women. However, some have challenged the notion that a product forcing women’s bodies into a more socially acceptable shape is somehow good for women in general.

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Blakely has addressed this by insisting that her products are to eliminate “panty lines,” which still promotes the weird idea that nobody should ever be aware that women wear underwear and isn’t exactly what it was originally advertised for, either.

Meanwhile, a collective donation by the world’s billionaires that wouldn’t even at all measurably change their lives could entirely end world hunger by the year 2030, according to a study out of Germany last year.

Still, the beat-down masses of the United States of America are so used to being treated so badly by the rich that this relatively tiny gift to Blakely’s office employees is being widely celebrated as an unusual act of generosity.

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*First Published: October 26, 2021, 2:41 pm

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