Bird's COO once reportedly got drunk and pretended to fire random employees over Slack as a joke

• Bird COO Steve Schnell got drunk and pretended to fire employees over Slack, The Verge reported Wednesday.
• Bird implied Schnell wasn't responsible, telling The Verge that someone took his phone and sent them as a prank and that the employees who received the messages recognized them as such.
• Former employees told The Verge about rampant problems with sexism, racism, and erratic decision-making among top leadership at the $2.5 billion electric scooter startup.
• In late March, the $2.5 billion electric scooter startup fired 30% of its workforce due to the coronavirus pandemic in a shocking 2-minute Zoom call.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Bird, an electric scooter startup last valued at $2.5 billion, has had extensive cultural problems among its top leadership, according to 16 former employees, The Verge reported Thursday.

In one particularly noteworthy incident that was widely known within the company, COO Steve Schnell pretended to fire random employees over Slack while he was drunk, according to The Verge.

"It was a joke," a former employee told The Verge, adding: "He was like, 'Haha.' Only he didn't say 'Haha' because he forgot."

"While at a summit in Amsterdam, someone took Steve's phone and played a practical joke on two top-performing employees he's close to, and those employees recognized it was a joke," Bird told The Verge, implying Schnell didn't actually send the messages himself.

Bird did not immediately respond to Business Insider's questions about whether Schnell was disciplined for the supposed prank or how it determined that employees who received messages believed it to be a joke.

The alleged incident seems to reflect more extensive cultural issues at the company's top ranks: employees alleged pay disparities between workers based on both gender and ethnicity and described executives as "bros with personality problems," "doofuses," "creepy," "very into nepotism," "not sound decision makers," and "frat boys." The Verge reported.

In late March, Bird shocked hundreds of employees — roughly 30% of its workforce — by abruptly laying them off in a 2-minute-long Zoom call, citing the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. The company stressed that its decision to have an unidentified Bird executive host the call was in order to ensure privacy, but employees criticized the move, after which they were immediately locked out of their email and Slack accounts.