Bernard's history
Bernard Duroc Danner grew up in a fairly well to do family. His father was on the board of directors at Total (French Oil Company) and that gave him a knowledge of the oil business.
He father send him over to the USA where he got his PHD in business at Wharton school of business in 1987.
That part is fairly well known.
What is not generally known is that he also got a gift of 20 million USD from his father as well.
He wanted to take that 20 million and use it and not just let it gain interest in some bank. As he had knowledge in the oilfield, that is where he wanted to invest it.
One of the things he noted with his father's company, Total is that they had limited success going into any country that had a National Oil Company (NOC).
However, the Oilfield Service Companies (Schlumberger and Halliburton) could get into these NOC's and Bernard noticed that.
He wanted to create his own version of a Schlumberger that he could be the head and CEO of. Also, a number of existing oilfield service companies were suffering from the downturn in oil price (It was $10 back then) and he could pick up these companies very cheaply.
And that is exactly what he did, He bought companies in distress (including Weatherford) and put them together into (as he would call it, One Weatherford). Of course, he also assumed the debt from these companies, as well, which he projected that he could pay off when the price improved.
As the price of oil increased from the $10/barrel to the $100+ range, so did his investments and they did very well and with oil price in the $100 range, he had no shortage of money coming into Weatherford.
Weatherford also got into places where Halliburton, Schlumberger and Baker were also located and the NOC's were all to happy to give Weatherford a chance as many of these NOC's felt they were overcharged by these other companies.
Of course, in some of these NOC's there was some corruption (as that was their normal way of doing business) but as long as nobody said anything, it was implied that it was okay.
Even with these legal problems, things were still okay although it certainly hurt them financially.
Even the disaster at Deep Horizon didn't affect Weatherford that much.
Legal problems aside, everything went fairly well, until the oil price took a long term steep drop around 2014 and then he and Weatherford struggled with what to do as the money they had flowing in essentially stopped.
He (and the board of directors) decided to cut positions and since North America had the greatest costs, that is where the bulk of the cuts occurred.
He (and the board of directors) also transferred the corporate head office from Bermuda to Switzerland and eventually to Ireland where the corporate tax rate was next to nothing.
He also tried to sell off divisions of Weatherford but as the offers Weatherford was getting were very low, he refused to sell.
When that was still not enough, Weatherford then started to cut benefits and you can see the uproar that has caused, especially in North America.