The Silicon Valley giants don't do options anymore, but RSUs (restricted stock units) which are simply share awards. There's no strike price to worry about, but of course it's a bit of a disappointment if you expected Uber to be a $100B company out of the gate.
Still, Uber employees will be happy that they can finally sell those RSU awards (in six months when the lockup expires).
I can’t speak for sure but that’s a little unlikely. RSUs are taxed on vesting. Bad idea when employees can’t sell a portion of it to pay the tax.
Uber, Airbnb and the rest definitely give RSUs. Details may vary but they may use contracts like “double trigger vesting” where you don’t actually receive the shares until they’re publicly traded.
Re:Uber opens at $42 per share
by intuitionist on Friday May 10, 2019 @04:32PM
(#19881953)
Expecting price parity with other large companies, okay. But the expectation in 2016 wasn’t for Facebook etc. to be at today’s prices in 2019, or they would have been priced higher then.
Even parity with cash. Investing in tech (say vgt) has had 90% returns over the past three years.
Re:Uber opens at $42 per share
by YeahSureWhyNot on Friday May 10, 2019 @06:59PM
(#19883072)
I think the story with Amazon and Facebook are from being over.
Re:Uber opens at $42 per share
by JMTQp8lwXL on Friday May 10, 2019 @03:55PM
(#19881641)
That can be a tricky comparison to make over time, due to share splits and merges. Apple has split 4 times, for example.
Taking these numbers at face value, I can't know if they account for it.
Microsoft in 2016 was $51, $127 now
Facebook was $97, $189 now
We're not even talking about rocket-ship growth here. We are talking about option strike prices losing money in one of the most favorable economic time periods where massive, healthy public business did have monstrous growth.
I would have at least expected price parity with other large companies - even that assumption would have been wrong.