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Comment by bigmattystyles | Hacker News Reader

Dumb question - but for those that remain, now that they no longer have RSUs / ESPP / etc, would you expect their salaries to be made commensurate to what their comp was before? How is this usually handled for companies that go from public (and where a large part of comp is stock) to private?

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Varies by company. My company recently went from public to private and they mostly told everyone getting RSUs to pound sand. No adjustment to salary to compensate for the change.

I'd be out the door already except the day they announced that, my director called me and gave me an RSU equivalent that was even bigger. Apparently they don't want to lose me yet. We'll certainly lose some developers though, and I don't blame them. Eventually I'll be one of them.

1. Delayed Cash bonuses with similar vesting times to RSUs

2. Delayed Cash bonuses with vesting terms tied to some company metric or calculation derived from company metric

3. Not replacing it to cause attrition to reduce costs

4. Some sort of hypothetical share tracking unit that only has a value if the company goes public or is bought again

Likely turns into cash over the same period at the buyout price. It technically depends on the change of management clause in your contract.

The firings will reduce the owed cash that Elon has to payout as a result of the stock swap. Smart move

There are RSUs. When a company goes private, the RSUs convert to cash on the same vesting schedule. Of course the company can cancel them, but they usually keep the vesting schedule to keep the employees.

For the Twitter employees (if they keep their jobs and the RSUs are not canceled) this is a very good deal, because the stock price was really high due to the deal.

That is not universally true. Sometimes it works like that, sometimes it doesn't. Depends on the buyer and given that this particular buyer doesn't seem interested in respecting legal contracts, I wouldn't be confident that it will work with Twitter as you describe here.

In our case the RSUs all insta-vested and got paid out, then got replaced with nothing.

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