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US-based principal and senior staff engineers, as well as staff engineers who negotiated hard with competing offer(s) and/or saw significant stock growth between their RSU grant and vest dates, could all have plausibly been clearing $800k in a given recent year. Even senior engineers, in outlier cases of the stock growth case.

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But as of the takeover, RSUs and options are likely being offered valued at the takeover price, while Elon knows the next 409A will likely value the company at ¼ of that.

Twitter went public at $45 a share and only had a max of $77. Sure some engineers could have almost doubled their RSU valuations if they had perfect timing but this isn't a case like GOOG/APPL/TSLA where 100x jumps occurred. Or is my thinking here naive?

I think your thinking is correct, and “almost doubled” is the kind of multiplier I was thinking of for the outlier, but not unrealistic, cases of some staff engineers or even occasionally senior engineers ending up with as much as $800k total comp in a given recent year. No need for 100x or even 5x stock growth to have occurred.

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