Lincoln Chafee Owns More Hewlett-Packard Stock Than Carly Fiorina

[Capt. Obvious]

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiornia may be best known as the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, but it turns out that another candidate holds more stock in the technology firm these days.

Lincoln Chafee—the Democratic former governor of Rhode Island—owns $50,001 to $100,000 of Hewlett-Packard stock, according to a financial disclosure released Tuesday by the Federal Election Commission. (Candidates only have to classify assets and income by range.) Fiorina, who ran HP for six years and has made her tenure there a key selling point in the presidential race, said she owns just $1,001 to $15,000 worth of shares in the Palo Alto-based firm in a disclosure from Thursday.

That makes a certain amount of sense, considering that Fiorina was fired in 2005 amid a tumble in the company's stock price following the controversial merger with Compaq. In campaign speeches, she has often called her termination the result of "a boardroom brawl" and blamed the decline on the tech bubble bursting for dooming the merger (critics say the move was doomed to begin with). Either way, Fiorina still invests in her former employer, though not heavily.

Fiorina and her husband entered more than 1,100 assets or source of income, many of them stock investments, on the FEC filings. They were worth approximately $59 million on their most recent federal tax filing. Chafee and his wife, who listed just 91 sources, are worth somewhere between about $24 million and $38 million, according to the FEC forms.

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Bloomberg

[djean111]

1. And - just think how much more it would probably be worth if Fiorina had never been CEO?

[Major Hogwash]

2. Fiornia was fired because she spent $21 million on a corporate jet while HP was drowning in debt.

The debt was accumulated due to her decision to buy Compaq.
A decision that she championed, and one that wound up tearing HP's board of directors in to pieces.

Fiorina didn't know how to pay off the debt caused by merging with Compaq, even though she tried several different mediocre marketing gimmicks to sell both companies' product lines.

However, at the same time, she wanted to fly across the country "in style" in a brand new corporate jet.
During the reorganization of HP after the merger with Compaq, 1000s of people lost their jobs.
Even before Fiorina bought that jet.

But, the fact that many more 1000s of people lost their jobs after she bought that jet, made it appear that she was laying those people off in order to pay for her jet . . and that was the reason she was fired.

Buying that jet was the straw that broke the camel's back.