Public companies will sometimes tell you $X amount of stock and not tell you the number of shares, which is what actually matters. For the purposes of the offer, the dont generally use today’s market price as their price per share. In those cases, you can actually end up with less than is offered.

And in pre-IPO companies that’s the norm, but that’s beside the point.

They will always tell you $X in stock, how else would they value it? But there will be a set date on which that $ amount converts to a number of shares, which then vest over time according to a schedule.

I have never seen an offer from a public company that has a # of shares attached to it. Only a dollar amount. Then it converts based on market value at conversion time.

Work at a FAANG - received a specified number of unvested shares with my offer, and a fixed vesting schedule.

Every grant I received had exactly how the number of shares would be calculated. Typically a trailing 10 day average as of the closing on a specific date.

Same, but I have friends who have gotten royally screwed on this :(

And friends who have gotten lucky when a dip happens right around conversion time.

Don’t know why this is being downvoted, this happened to me. Company IPOd and didn’t really know what to value their stock at yet because it was so volatile so they offered me $x with the exact number to be deterred after a few months