"troll account. didn't actually get laid off from bold. curious to see how long it takes HN to realize this."

To answer the question, it took HN only a few minutes for some users to realize this, but 2 hours for me to find out about it. Most of that time, an email was sitting in the inbox waiting. Thank you for pointing this out, and also to the user who emailed, since otherwise I wouldn't have seen this. We rely on the community to route info to us. Fortunately HN has a lot of users who care about the quality of the site.

All: if you notice anything weird, dodgy, or otherwise degrading of quality, we always appreciate a heads-up at [email protected]. HN admins are mostly a clearinghouse for things that the community notices, so this really is a shared effort.

throwaabolt's profile account is now:

"ex-employee of bolt. ready to tackle new challenges, in particular in the fintech or insurtech areas."

I don't know what to believe. throwaabolt's futher messages:

"thank you. can my wife's boyfriend contact you too? he is part of the layoff as well."

what?

Please don't create accounts to do this.

> There IS risk to the employee; they now have a real loan outstanding and 100% personal recourse, so if the common stock becomes less than exercise price, their personal assets are on the hook

So I suppose the bank will be after your personal assets?

HOPEFULLY this loan isn't a lot more than OP's salary. And theoretically, they can be sold for a decent percentage of the principal.

In all seriousness good luck going forward.