I think most people should understand by now, these massive option grants are basically playing roulette with a huge chunk of your remuneration package. It's meant to align your interests with the company but let's face it - no one starting at facebook today will have any meaningful impact on the share price as an individual. Instead it's a great way of companies making their employees take significant risk.<p>When I graduated I could have worked at 3 generally similar companies, the lowest salary offer was £27k, the highest was £35k, all had significant RSU packages (nothing like crazy US numbers). In the 5 years following my graduation, 1 company got bought by Intel providing a 50% pop for the share price, 1 company got bought by Softbank providing a 50% pop for the share price, 1 got eviscerated by Apple and practically destroyed the share price. There was no meaningful way of knowing which way any of those would go. As a graduate I had no real chance of impacting the shareprice of those events. Yet for some reason between 0-30% of my renumeration was determined by it!
Nice, thanks for sharing. It wasn't clear to me whether you cashed in your options. Is there still the chance you could lose that gain if the stock went down?
He actually didn't gross $92k. That's not only unrealized stock options, it also assumes he'd stay in Facebook for next 3 years. He actually grossed 1/4th of that, given he stays in Facebook till end of first year.