>Meta pulled the same thing recently.

Do you mean the Scale AI acquihire? I took it at face value that Alex Wang just joined Meta, but come to think of it now, the company's just a husk of itself, customers no longer trust them, etc. So, it seems you're referring to Scale.

Yeah, that must be the one. What did other employees get?

Thanks for the response.

It’s breaking my brain a little bit that this isn’t a straightforward breach of fiduciary duties to the corporation and its common stockholders. If an acquirer can deal with top management and holders of preferred shares, and scoop out the crown jewels of the corporation, then what’s even the point of using a Delaware corporation to raise capital? Might as well just form a Nevada LLC using an LLC agreement that just says “good luck.”

Seems like that makes options completely useless. If they had actual shares they could at least sue because majority shareholders have a duty not to completely screw over the minority.

It has always been possible (and sometimes happens) for VCs and mgmt to screw the early employees.

The question is will it become more common now?

Also, people equate these to aquihire deals. But they are not really. Most aquihire deals are when the company is out of runway, or it seems growth has slowed/stopped and there are no good ways out. There is not mucH value left.

Here there is clearly billions in value, it’s just not being distributed in the normal way.

It feels like it will become more common if Google gets away with this with no real backlash.

I mean why would anyone honor employee options when buying out a company if you can just poach all the key employees and assets.

As you said there was so much money involved. I can’t think of a similar situation where employees were screwed out of billions like this.

You can, and maybe should, exercise 1 option as soon as you get it to turn yourself into a shareholder.

Sounds like a breach of fiduciary duty to the common shareholders.