“The real job of the board of directors is to come up with the right CEO and to prevent him or her from overreaching; if they do that job well, the rest will take care of itself.”
— Warren Buffett, 2004 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting
Simon Johnson was there at the very beginning. He joined Seadrill in 2005, the year Fredriksen founded it, and spent five years selling its rigs while the empire swelled toward $22 billion. He left before the fall and watched both bankruptcies from other companies’ windows. Then, in March 2022, one month after the second wipeout, this board fired the CEO who had steered it through the courtroom, Stuart Jackson, effective immediately, and handed the wreck to Johnson.
He sold the junk. He shrank the share count by a fifth. He signed the billion dollar Petrobras contracts that are paying for this year’s recovery. On February 25, he hit his own guidance and told the market Seadrill enters 2026 from a position of strength.
Fifteen days later, the same board did it to him. Same month of the year. Same two words. Same chair, Julie Robertson, who has run this boardroom since the day the new Seadrill was born. No transition. No reason.
The severance agreement runs for pages. Salary continuation. An earned bonus. Forfeited equity. And near the bottom, one line I have not been able to forget. The company that paid Simon Johnson $27 million over three years agreed to ship his household goods back to Australia and fly his family home. In economy.
Most companies change CEOs the way diplomats change governments, with six month transitions and flattering press releases. Seadrill changes CEOs the way you change a lock.
A few days ago, I showed you a company that can no longer die the way it used to.
Today I answer the question that ending left open. Who actually runs this thing. Same five tests I ran on Copart’s two CEOs. How the men are paid. What they did with their own shares. What they did with your money. What they said when it went wrong. And what they did when they thought nobody was reading. Full scorecard at the bottom. No mercy.
One number before the line, free of charge. Seadrill has been a public company for four and a half years. In that time, the number of shares bought on the open market by its own insiders, any insider, any amount, is zero. Not one CEO, not one director, has ever paid cash for a share of the company they run.
Below the line, it gets stranger. This June, days before the company started buying back its own stock, two of its top executives were selling theirs.
And further down, inside the new CEO’s employment agreement, sits a clause I think explains everything on this page, including why Johnson had to go. It triples his successor’s severance in exactly one scenario. Before you scroll past the line, try to guess which one.
