Bungie CEO Pete Parsons has seemingly spent over $2 Million on classic cars and motorbikes since Sony bought the studio back in 2022
The executive has faced calls to resign from former Bungie staff following yesterday's layoff announcement.
Since Bungie was acquired by Sony back in February 2022 for $3.6 billion, the Destiny 2 developer's CEO Pete Parsons has seemingly spent over $2 million on classic cars and motorcycles via auction site Bring A Trailer. A number of the account in question's purchases have come in the months surrounding mass layoffs at Bungie.
Parsons has faced calls to resign following yesterday's announcement that the studio is laying off 220 staff, with a further 155 set to integrated into Sony, and 40 being "spun off" into a new PlayStation studio which will take on development of one of Bungie's "incubation projects". In the announcement, Parsons wrote that Bungie had been "overly ambitious, our financial safety margins were subsequently exceeded, and we began running in the red".
Since news broke of these latest layoffs, which follow another round of job cuts at Bungie back in October 2023, an account on classic car auction site Bring A Trailer with the username 'bngpparsons' has come to light. Valorant player association program manager Taylor 'Tailored' Broomall has claimed in a tweet that this account, which has clocked up over $2 million worth of winning bids since September 2022, belongs to Parsons.
"Bungie lays off 17% of it's workforce...unrelated here is a list of cars the CEO has purchased on BAT", Broomall wrote, "Players and workers need to support each other."
The 'bngpparsons' account's first listed auction win is dated September 23, 2022, and saw a $34,000 bid be accepted for a 1973 Datsun 240Z. The most recent is dated June 1, 2024, and saw a $91,500 bid be accepted for a 1961 Chevrolet Corvette. "How exciting," the account commented after winning the auction for the Corvette, "I have wanted a C1 since I was a little kid. My second hot wheel ever (in gold). Going to its forever home."
Overall, the purchases made by the account between these two points — including the aforementioned Corvette and Datsun — total $2,414,550. This includes $201,000 spent in one successful bid for a 1971 Porsche 911S Coupe on November 22, 2023, less than a month after the news of that first round of layoffs at Bungie came out. Several of the cars purchased by the account look to be on display in a Flickr album dated April 2024 entitled "Avants hosts a private tour of Pete Parsons' car garage collection".
In an IGN report from the time of those October layoffs, a Bungie department head was cited as having responded to employees asking in a post-layoff Q&A session whether Bungie leadership taking salary cuts to prevent layoffs had been considered by saying that Bungie was “not that type of company.”
We've reached out to Bungie for comment on this story.