This week I was chasing the story of Sotheby’s layoffs. My sources told me that the auction house’s staffers were in a state of panic. Nobody knew what was going on. There had been no communications from the management. Names of top-ranking staffers losing their jobs kept swirling, but some had not been officially notified.
More than 100 people at Sotheby’s are losing their jobs, it has since become clear. Entire departments have been affected in some cases, raising questions about whether the auction house will axe entire categories. Conversations continue, and some people will become consultants instead of full-time employees.
Just as all this was unfolding, Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart took to Instagram with a post that showed him posing against a blue sky, natty in black shades and a tan blazer. Behind him, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi was rising, a prehistoric beast amid construction cranes. “The Capital of Capital is quickly become a Capital of Architecture too,” Stewart wrote, tagging Abu Dhabi Finance Week, which bills itself as a gathering of “the world’s most distinguished leaders, market experts and entrepreneurs from over 100 countries.”
“So, tone deaf to post these while people’s livelihoods are over right before Christmas,” a serious West Coast collector of contemporary art messaged me, after I reposted the photograph on my own Instagram account. “This is why more CEOs are going to get shot.”
The collector was, of course, referring to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York last week. In its aftermath, populist, anti-CEO voices on social media have celebrated the alleged killer, Luigi Mangione.
While I find such responses to the tragic event deeply troubling, I can understand the resentment, having been schooled in class struggles and revolutionary zeal at an early age in the Soviet Union, where I grew up. I obviously wish Charlie Stewart a long and healthy life. But the optics of his post were not ideal. How does something like this happen?
A friend from journalism school, Robin Moroney, a communications-strategy consultant who spent years as the executive communications lead for Google CEO Sundar Pichai, told me it’s a classic PR snafu.
“Executive communications is often the work of many hands and this feels like the hand that pumps out the social content on the regular didn’t know about the hand that pushed send on the email announcing layoffs,” Moroney said.
But Stewart is known to write his own posts on Instagram, where he keeps a casual tone with his more than 19,000 followers.
His Abu Dhabi post has garnered 481 likes so far, and there are plenty of fans in the comments. “Cool and sharp,” one person said. “Crispy,” said another, adding a fire emoji.
But some questioned the trip’s timing.
“Should not you be in New York?” one person asked. Stewart replied to the person with three airplane emojis.
And some were more critical.
“Classy post considering you fired 100 people today. What a legend,” one user wrote. (The comment has been deleted.) Another person responded with a hashtag: #greatplacetowork.
I reached out to Sotheby’s to get some clarity. The layoffs in New York began last week, and Stewart has been involved every step of the way, according to a Sotheby’s spokesperson.
Stewart left on a 48-hour business trip on Sunday to meeting with Sotheby’s new minority shareholder, ADQ, an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, and he was back in his office in New York on Wednesday morning, the person said. While on his flight back, he posted about his whirlwind trip.
The ADQ fund is investing $1 billion in Sotheby’s, whose majority owner, Patrick Drahi, currently has companies facing down a $60 billion mountain of debt, with some loans coming due as soon as 2027.
I suspect that, while Stewart looks like he was vacationing on a sunny planet, he was jet-lagged as hell, having flown almost 14,000 miles (and more than 24 hours) in three days. When he returned, he had to deal with more layoffs in London, Paris, and elsewhere—and deal with the blowback from his Instagram post.
Let’s give the guy a break.