The first emergency board meeting began before the announcement had been public for twenty minutes.
The pharmaceutical company's headquarters occupied an entire city block in New Jersey, and the building that normally emptied by seven PM still had lights in every executive floor at midnight. The CEO had been pulled from a charity dinner. The Chief Scientific Officer had been on a plane to London and turned around mid-flight. The rest arrived from homes, restaurants, theaters, wherever midnight on a weeknight found people who earned eight-figure salaries.
Nobody had needed to explain why the meeting was urgent. They'd all seen it.
The CFO spoke first because the financial implications were the easiest to quantify even if they were the hardest to accept. "Our market cap has dropped eleven percent in after-hours trading. That's $23 billion in shareholder value gone in forty minutes. When markets open tomorrow, we're expecting another twenty to thirty percent decline at minimum."
