Pete Parsons, CEO of the Destiny 2 developer, appears to have spent more than $2 million on classic cars and motorcycles through auction site Bring A Trailer since Bungie was acquired by Sony for $3.6 billion in February 2022. Many of the account’s purchases occurred in the months before and after Bungie’s massive layoffs.
Parsons has faced calls to resign after the studio announced yesterday that it was laying off 220 people, 155 of whom would be folded into Sony and 40 of whom would be “spun off” to a new PlayStation studio to work on one of Bungie’s “incubation projects.” In the announcement, Parsons wrote that Bungie “became overambitious and subsequently exceeded our financial security, and we began to run into the red.”
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Since news of the recent layoffs broke (after another round of layoffs at Bungie in October 2023), an account with the username “bngpparsons” has come to light on classic car auction site Bring A Trailer. Valorant Player Association project manager Taylor ‘Tailored’ Broomall claimed in a tweet that the account belongs to Parsons and that it has received more than $2 million in winning bids since September 2022.
“Bungie laid off 17% of its staff… unrelated, here’s a list of cars the CEO bought with BAT,” Broomall wrote. “Players and workers need to support each other.”
The “bngpparsons” account’s first auction win was on September 23, 2022, when someone bid $34,000 for a 1973 Datsun 240Z. The most recent was on June 1, 2024, when someone bid $91,500 for a 1961 Chevrolet Corvette. The account commented after winning the Corvette auction: “So exciting, I’ve wanted a C1 since I was a kid. This is my second Hot Wheels (gold). I’m taking it home forever.”
Overall, the account’s purchases between those two points totaled $2,414,550, including the aforementioned Corvette and Datsun. That included $201,000 spent on a successful bid for a 1971 Porsche 911S Coupe on November 22, 2023, less than a month after news of Bungie’s first layoffs broke. Several of the cars purchased by the account appear to be featured in an April 2024 Flickr album titled “Avants Hosts a Private Tour of Pete Parsons’ Car Garage Collection.”
In a report from IGN at the time of the layoffs in October, it was claimed that during a post-layoff Q&A session, when employees asked Bungie leadership if they had considered taking pay cuts to prevent layoffs, a Bungie department head responded that Bungie was “not that kind of company.”
We’ve reached out to Bungie for comment.
