It's simple to say we'd be more charitable if we had incomes 1,000x or more our current annual compensation, but I do genuinely wonder if I'd be different. Would I be greedy, would I care about doing right to the laid off employees-- it's hard to imagine how crossing that bridge might change people.

Looking at Robinhood stock, it might be way less than that now. But I get your point

Robinhood is a public company. There's no difference between getting stock/RSU compared to getting paid in cash and then using it to buy stocks.

That's because it effectively is. I suggest you look into pledged asset lines (and more broadly 'buy, borrow, die'), which are even more tax advantaged than just getting paid directly. Sure, there is some marginal cost associated with borrowing against granted equity, but it's almost certainly less than 10%. So yes, it is accurate to assume that if an exec vets $x00 million dollars of equity a year, they have a high percentage of that available to spend on whatever consumption or investment they desire.

Feels like you're arguing semantics, either way the CEO is being made wealthy right?

Probably still getting much more than they need to live off of, so some of that should go to the people getting let go.

It's even more bizarre/frustrating for someone, especially in tech where many of our TC is largely RSUs, not understand that wealth is almost never held in cash.

When I was young (and poor) I also believed that being rich meant having Scrooge McDuck piles of cash to swim in.

After my first big RSU payout I quickly realized that nobody with more than a few 100k in assets keeps anything close to the majority of them in cash. Savings accounts are for the poor. Anyone, even in the every day millionaire level, keeps most of their wealth in non-cash investments, leaving only enough cash to cover crisis situations. Especially with inflation this high, holding cash is literally throwing money away.

Nobody has a bank account with 8 zeros, except maybe lottery winners that never learned the basics of asset management.

That's not really true, at least not in the same way being discussed above. Jobs already owned millions of shares in Apple stock, so yes, he profited from the stock but AFAIK that was only from the appreciation of existing stock, not from new grants.

Coz salary is taxed higher, many billionaires do this. He had enough control to not pay tax and just spend on the company's credit card.