perhaps technically (I'm not very familiar with private futures), but now we have a large number of employees looking for niche buyers to acquire $3.5 billion of stripe futures, which doesn't seem very realistic.

I get why a buyback makes more sense here.

What I don't understand is why they didn't just let the current options expire and issue new ones with a fresh 10 year expiry, an IPO vesting trigger, and no employment contingency.