BlackBerry CEO to Make $55.6 Million If He Sells Company
BlackBerry Ltd. (BB) Chief Executive Officer Thorsten Heins stands to make $55.6 million if he sells the company and is ousted. — That's the amount he's entitled to receive if BlackBerry has a change of control and Heins is pushed …
Context & Ripple Effects
BlackBerry put itself up for sale earlier this week, halting trading on August 12 to announce it is actively seeking a buyer — the culmination of a brutal stretch under Thorsten Heins that included roughly 5,000 job cuts the previous year, another 250 R&D layoffs in July 2013, and the end of support for the PlayBook tablet.
The sale framing is a sharp reversal from April, when Heins was predicting tens of millions of Q10 sales and the stock rose on his optimism. Bloomberg's disclosure that Heins holds a $55.6 million change-of-control package now puts his personal economics squarely inside any negotiation.
First-order effects
- Heins is confirmed entitled to $55.6 million if BlackBerry changes hands and he is ousted, meaning any bidder's offer price effectively absorbs that cost alongside the company's operating losses.
- The board's August 12 decision to shop the company makes this package immediately live rather than theoretical — every suitor's diligence now includes the CEO's exit terms.
Second-order effects
- Bidders have an incentive to structure deals around keeping Heins through a transition or negotiating his package down, since ousting him outright raises the effective acquisition cost.
- With handset momentum stalled since the Q10 launch cycle and BBM already ported to iOS in May, buyer interest tilts toward valuing BlackBerry as an asset pool — messenger software, patents, services — rather than a going-concern phone maker.
Third-order effects
- The episode illustrates how change-of-control compensation has become a standard variable in distressed-tech M&A, shaping who gets hired as a turnaround CEO and how break-up valuations get negotiated.
- If BlackBerry sells in pieces rather than whole, it becomes a template for once-dominant device vendors monetizing software and IP separately from hardware operations.
The trend: Distressed smartphone makers are shifting from turnaround narratives to asset-sale math, with executive change-of-control packages increasingly priced into the deal.