These days CEOs don’t only need to keep a close eye on what they tweet and what they say, but also on what they wear.
Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal has been criticized by social media users for wearing a T-shirt worth Rs. 30,000 while announcing that employees would receive no salary hikes for the second consecutive year at the company. Munjal made the announcement through a video, but eagle-eyed social media users noticed that he was wearing a Burberry Parker cotton T-shirt during the announcement. The T-shirt is available on online stores for 319 euros (Rs. 30,000).
“It’s been tough, and that’s why I have one bad news that we won’t be able to do any appraisals this year,” Munjal said in the video. “I know I said that we will do appraisals two, three weeks ago, but when we started the process, we realised that we made a mistake,” he added.
But social media users criticized his sartorial choices while making the announcement. “This is Burberry Black Parker tshirt with embroidered logo. Yeah agreed that one shouldn’t go after their personal stuff. But it is what it is,” wrote a Reddit user. “These CEOs won’t lower their own standard of living but rather stop appraisals for the people who are running their businesses,” wrote another.
This isn’t the first time that Gaurav Munjal has been criticized for his extravagant lifestyle. During the pandemic, Munjal had stayed for 6 months at the Oberoi in Bangalore, claiming it helped him be more productive. He’d even got some teammates to work out of the Oberoi, often working from the 5-star hotel for 20 days at a stretch. Unacademy also reportedly sent two luxury BMW cars to receive the founders of a startup it was keen to acquire, and Munjal met the team at a luxury villa where he was surrounded by personal security guards. Munjal also regularly flew on private planes, which cost significantly more than even first class tickets. He reportedly justified a private jet expenditure to a colleague saying every hour of his is potentially worth as much as $100,000 (about Rs 80 lakh), so if he spends say $50,000 (Rs. 40 lakh) on a jet, he is in fact saving $50,000 because of the time it saves him.
Unacademy, meanwhile, had reported a loss of Rs. 1,678 crore in FY23, and now hasn’t given any of its employees raises for two consecutive years. Interestingly, this comes weeks after Munjal had posted on X that things were looking up for the firm. “Unacademy will have its best year in terms of growth and profitability,” he’d written n 4th July. But the fact that Munjal has now announced no salary hikes for employees — and worn a Rs. 30,000 T-shirt while doing so — doesn’t seem to have gone down well with India’s social media users.