It’s not mandatory, spacex employees can keep their shares in hope of an eventual IPO

For SpaceX? I knew the company offered to buy back the shares at regular intervals. I am disappointed to learn they are mandatory.

I didn't mean to imply that. I think you can keep the shares.

But there are limits to how many non-insider (e.g. former employees), non-accredited investors a company can have before it is required to go public. For this reason a lot of companies do try to make it mandatory and/or offer sweet deals to buy the shares back upon leaving the company.

> there are limits to how many non-insider (e.g. former employees), non-accredited investors a company can have before it is required to go public.

I thought that limit was some trivial number. I thought the much larger number (2,000 IIRC) was made up of investors who were either insiders or accredited investors.

500. Although I thought the JOBS act increased that number to 2500, but my google-fu is failing me. In any case, once you have that many shareholders on record, you HAVE to go public. This is what forced Google and Facebook to eventually go public.

Companies often get around this by not doing everything possible to prevent an employee from becoming a shareholder on record. E.g. settling option contracts for cash.