Epic Games has parted ways with its chief people officer, Monika Fahlbusch. The c-suite change comes less than a month after the Fortnite maker announced mass layoffs affecting over 1,000 employees.
The company confirmed that Fahlbusch’s last day was April 15 but declined to elaborate on why she was leaving or whether she was fired. The HR executive joined Epic back in December 2020 after spending the previous two years as chief people officer at Juul Labs, the company whose mission it is to “transition the world’s billion adult smokers away from combustible cigarettes.” Fahlbusch did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As Epic’s head of HR, Fahlbusch would have had a key role in executing the company’s latest round of downsizing. The second wave of mass layoffs since 2023 took many rank-and-file staff at the company by surprise. “We are mindful of the difficulties that this layoff poses to employees and the community,” Fahlbusch wrote in a letter to the Department of Commerce for North Carolina, where the company is headquartered, when the layoffs were announced.
The cuts included one employee suffering from terminal brain cancer whose family risked losing out on his life insurance as a result. CEO Tim Sweeney later said Epic would be in contact with the family and fix the insurance issue. The cofounder faced widespread blowback for the layoffs, which he blamed in part on a costly anti-trust legal crusade.
“In the coming days, employers will see a stream of resumes of once-in-a-lifetime quality folks,” he wrote in March. “An important thing to understand is that Epic never lowered our hiring standards as we grew, and the layoff wasn’t a performance-based ‘rightsizing’ as companies call it nowadays.”
Last week, Bloomberg reported that the company is currently pinning its financial recovery to a $1.5 billion partnership with Disney, which includes work on an extraction shooter featuring Disney characters. It also detailed some people’s alleged concerns around chief operating officer Dan Vogel reportedly rushing projects and occasionally cursing at employees meetings.
“This is just not true,’’ senior director of global communications Liz Marksman told the publication. “Meetings at Epic are directed at discussing and debating plans and ideas.” She added that while Vogel “drives our ambitious timelines,” Bloomberg was “conflating cursing for emphasis with cursing at people. The latter is not tolerated at Epic and is not behavior exhibited by Daniel Vogel.”