Vishal Garg, the Better.com founder who became internationally notorious after firing about 900 employees during a brief Zoom call in 2021, has now been removed from the chief executive role at the mortgage company he built and is mounting an aggressive campaign to regain control.

Better Home & Finance Holding Company announced on August 3 that board member Daniel Lewis had been appointed interim chief executive with immediate effect.

The company's initial public description said Garg had "mutually agreed" with the board to transition out of the CEO role and would remain a director.

Subsequent accounts of the internal dispute, however, describe a far more contentious removal, with Garg challenging the board's authority and seeking to reverse the leadership change.

The episode has attracted particular attention because Garg's public reputation is still closely tied to the December 2021 Zoom call in which he dismissed roughly 900 employees, about 9% of Better's workforce at the time, shortly before Christmas.

In a meeting lasting only a few minutes, Garg told participants that anyone on the call was part of the group being terminated immediately.

The manner of the dismissal generated an international backlash.

Former employees described losing access to company systems soon afterward, while senior executives resigned amid criticism of the company's handling of the layoffs and Garg's leadership style.

Garg stepped away temporarily and apologized for the way the redundancies were conducted, acknowledging that he had mishandled the process.

His departure did not last.

Better's board reinstated him as chief executive in January 2022 after a short leave, saying changes would be made to strengthen the company's leadership structure and that Garg would receive executive coaching.

He subsequently remained at the center of the business through a brutal downturn in the mortgage market and Better's eventual public listing in 2023.

The company's financial trajectory has been difficult.

Better went public through a special-purpose acquisition company transaction in August 2023, and the shares collapsed more than 90% immediately after trading began.

The company has continued to report substantial losses while repeatedly cutting costs and trying to reposition itself as an artificial-intelligence-driven mortgage technology platform.

The most recent available operating results show a more complicated picture than a company in simple free fall.

Better reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of approximately $48 million, up 52% from a year earlier, and loan volume of $1.64 billion, an increase of 89%.

At the same time, its quarterly net loss widened to approximately $70 million.

The company was still targeting adjusted operating profitability later in 2026 while pursuing additional cost reductions.

Lewis had joined Better's board only days before becoming interim chief executive.

He is the founder and managing partner of Orange Capital and was presented at the time of his appointment as an experienced investor who could help sharpen strategy, capital allocation and corporate governance.

Garg himself publicly welcomed Lewis to the board in late July and praised the experience he could bring to Better's next stage of development.

That apparent alignment quickly collapsed.

Garg now argues that Lewis gained his trust and a board seat while publicly supporting the company's strategy, only to participate in the move that removed him from day-to-day control.

Those assertions are Garg's account of the dispute and have not been independently established as evidence of deception or wrongdoing by Lewis.

The boardroom battle has since escalated beyond an argument over one executive position.

Garg and aligned shareholders are attempting to remove several directors, including Lewis, and replace them with their own nominees.

Garg's camp says investors representing approximately 52% of the company's voting power support the effort.

That figure represents the dissident group's claim and the outcome will depend on the company's voting structure, applicable corporate procedures and whether the proposed shareholder action survives any legal challenges.

Garg has retained high-profile litigation lawyer Alex Spiro and lawyers from Quinn Emanuel as the struggle moves into corporate and potentially judicial proceedings.

The dissident shareholders are seeking a vote that could remove Lewis and other directors, creating the possibility that Garg could regain effective control even after losing the chief executive title.

The dispute is particularly unusual because Better has historically had a multi-class share structure that gave Garg substantial voting influence.

Regulatory filings have long shown that his economic ownership and voting power are not necessarily the same because different classes of shares carry different voting rights.

That makes the battle less straightforward than a normal confrontation between a dismissed chief executive and an independent board.

Garg has also indicated that he would be willing to return to the chief executive position for a nominal salary of $1 a year, presenting the offer as evidence that his objective is to restore the business rather than maximize his own compensation.

Whether shareholders regard that proposal as a sign of commitment or another tactical element in the control fight will become clearer if the proposed board vote proceeds.

For former Better employees, the irony of Garg's removal has been impossible to ignore.

Social-media posts have revived the 2021 Zoom footage and framed his ouster as corporate karma, with some former workers expressing satisfaction that an executive associated with an unusually impersonal mass dismissal has now experienced an involuntary loss of power himself.

That reaction is understandable as commentary but should not obscure the difference between the two events.

The 900 workers dismissed in 2021 were ordinary employees losing their jobs and income.

Garg remains a major shareholder and director involved in a sophisticated corporate-control battle and is actively attempting to overturn the decision.

His financial and legal position is therefore very different from that of the workers dismissed during the Zoom call.

The board's decision also cannot be reduced solely to the symbolism of the 2021 controversy.

Better has spent years confronting mortgage-market weakness, heavy losses, repeated restructuring and the challenge of converting its technology investment into sustainable profitability.

Garg's leadership record includes both rapid growth and persistent controversy, while the company's directors now face pressure to explain why a founder they continued supporting for years was suddenly no longer the right person to run the business.

The immediate question is no longer whether Garg has lost the chief executive title; he has.

The next question is whether that removal will survive the shareholder revolt he is organizing.

If the group claiming majority voting support succeeds in replacing enough directors, Better could experience the unusual spectacle of a founder being removed by his own board and then using shareholder power to remove the directors who ousted him.