Since Bungie was acquired by Sony for $3.6 billion in February 2022, Destiny 2 developer CEO Pete Parsons appears to have spent more than $2 million via auction site Bring A Trailer Buy classic cars and motorcycles. Many of the account’s purchases were made during a few months of massive layoffs at Bungie.
Parsons announced yesterday that the studio will lay off 220 employees, 155 of whom will be integrated into Sony, and another 40 employees will be “spun off” to a new PlayStation studio, which will be responsible for Bungie’s After the development of “Game”, Parsons faced calls to resign. Parsons wrote in the announcement that Bunge “was overly ambitious, our financial margin of safety was subsequently exceeded, and we began to lose money.”
Manage cookie settings
Since news of another round of layoffs at Bungie broke in October 2023, an account with the username “bngpparsons” on the classic car auction website Bring A Trailer has been exposed. Valorant Players Association project manager Taylor ‘Tailored’ Broomall claimed in a tweet that the account, which has received more than $2 million worth of winning bids since September 2022, belongs to Parsons.
“Bungie laid off 17% of its workforce… and had nothing to do with the list of cars the CEO bought on BAT,” Broomall wrote. “Players and workers need to support each other.”
The first auction win date for the account “bngpparsons” was September 23, 2022, with an accepted bid of $34,000 for a 1973 Datsun 240Z. The most recent auction, June 1, 2024, brought a bid of $91,500 for a 1961 Chevrolet Corvette. “So exciting,” the account commented after winning the Corvette auction, “I’ve wanted a C1 since I was a kid. My second Hot Wheels (gold). Back to its forever home.”
Overall, the account’s purchases between those two points (including the aforementioned Corvette and Datsun) totaled $2,414,550. This includes a successful bid for a 1971 Porsche 911S Coupe for $201,000 on November 22, 2023, less than a month after news of Bungie’s first round of layoffs broke. Several cars purchased by the account appear to appear in a Flickr album posted in April 2024 titled “Avants Hosts Private Tour of Pete Parsons’ Garage Collection.”
In an IGN report on the layoffs in October, a Bungie department head said in response to an employee’s question during a post-layoff Q&A session whether Bungie leadership had considered taking salary cuts to prevent layoffs that Bungie “is not that type of company.” ”
We’ve reached out to Bungie for comment.
