Again as I have said repeatedly - the ceo got 11 million. It seems that they could have taken less and employees could have taken more.
As far as the employees losing there jobs years ago: if that had happened they would have got jobs elsewhere, maybe jobs that paid them what they were worth.
Other things that make it theft: people who got the biggest pay outs were the ones he rewrote the charter to ensure that the employees got nothing.
This is theft. If you change the value of something you have already used to pay someone, it is theft.
And yeah “it’s a lottery”, but what they did was basically the same as you buy a lottery ticket that says there a 10% chance of winning $1000 if you wait 6 months before scratching it off, and then 5 months later they say “we’ve change the reward amounts, now it’s $100. Except instead of being a lottery ticket it was the employees time, money, and cost from losing out on other opportunities.
In very simple probability terms. The value of stock as payment for employment at a startup is
ExpectedValue = amount * P(non preferred stock gets money) * ExpectedStoxkPrive
The exact amount you would accept for working at a startup obviously varies from person to person. You estimate the probability that you’ll be able to sell your stock, based on the details of the company, and offer to work in exchange for what you consider a fair amount. After that the company deliberately changes the probability of you receiving a pay out on the stock you have already been granted. That is they retroactively changed what they paid you.
Also employees don’t get cash salaries, they get a mix of cash and stock. The statement is: we know your time is worth more than we can afford to pay you in cash. So we will accept that you are reinvesting part of your earnings as a capital investment in the company.
The company depends of capital being invested until it is profitable. The stock being granted to employees is because the employees are directly investing their own money into the company.
The difference between employees and VC is the VC have enough ownership of the company to steal from the other owners.