Foley sold a Manhattan townhouse and an East Hampton estate after stepping down.
Key Takeaways
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John Foley says losing his job as the CEO of Peloton cost him dearly.
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Foley, once a billionaire, told the New York Post that he “had to sell almost everything.”
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The embattled fitness company has since gone through another CEO. Foley founded a rug company.
This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
John Foley is opening up about his financial difficulties after departing as the CEO of Peloton.
Foley, who cofounded Peloton in 2012 and was at the helm for a decade, recently told the New York Post about his financial woes after leaving the company.
“You know, at one point I had a lot of money on paper,” he said. “Not actually [in the bank], unfortunately. I’ve lost all my money. I’ve had to sell almost everything in my life.”
Foley was at one point a billionaire as business for the connected fitness company, which makes exercise bikes and treadmills, boomed during the pandemic. But the company overestimated demand as COVID-19 restrictions lifted, gyms reopened, and people started exercising outside of their homes again.
Foley sold a Manhattan townhouse and an East Hampton estate after stepping down.
“My family took it well,” he told the Post. “My wife’s super supportive. My kids are probably better for it, if we’re keeping it real.”
After leaving Peloton, he started a direct-to-consumer rug company called Ernesta with two fellow Peloton cofounders, Hisao Kushi and Yony Feng.
“I’m working hard so that I can try to make money again … because I don’t have much left,” Foley told the Post. “And so I’m hungry and humble.”
Peloton has since cycled through another CEO, Barry McCarthy, and currently has two interim co-CEOs.
In its fourth-quarter earnings, the company showed progress in its turnaround efforts following the management shakeups, a major stock slump, rounds of job cuts, and a massive recall in recent years.
Foley did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Foley was worth $1.9 billion at Peloton’s peak, but his personal fortune slipped to $225 million by the time he stepped down as CEO in February 2022, according to Bloomberg.
Foley’s overnight billionaire status was lost by November 2021 but things took a turn for the worse just before Christmas of that year.
The first episode of the Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That featured a storyline in which one of the main characters, Mr. Big, suffers a heart attack while riding his Peloton.
‘We were coming out of Covid. The stock was getting crushed. And then the Mr. Big thing happens … it was brutal,’ Foley recalled.
‘We really did think we were doing something special for the world. We really did care about our members. We cared about our shareholders, we cared about our employees.
‘And all of a sudden, we were just being trolled… everything was collapsing,’ he said.
Peloton laid off another 400 employees earlier that summer and has continued to shutter its bricks-and-mortar stores in an effort to cut costs.
