Re:Zynga stock plummets below value of its cash and real estate
by tsotha on Thursday October 11, 2012 @02:44AM
(#4639774)
People like that have lawyers on retainer. And if those same lawyers did their job when the options contracts were written, the lawsuits won't amount to anything.
This is a pretty common story. Probably more common than when the options pay anything. I once worked for a company that acquired another company. We were bigger, our CEO set up the deal, their CEO got paid, etc. But officially it was a "merger of equals". Why? Because if we'd bought them their options would have vested immediately and we would have had to buy up all the stock the employees held.
The way it was worked my company traded their options for options in the new company. Two years later everyone who had worked for the company we acquired was out of a job, and they had to decide whether or not to exercise their options in a company that wasn't publicly traded (which is madness, BTW - never, ever do that). I would have bought one of those mirrors on a stick and checked under my car every day if I'd been the CEO. But eventually he cashed out for a cool $15m.
This is a pretty common story. Probably more common than when the options pay anything. I once worked for a company that acquired another company. We were bigger, our CEO set up the deal, their CEO got paid, etc. But officially it was a "merger of equals". Why? Because if we'd bought them their options would have vested immediately and we would have had to buy up all the stock the employees held.
The way it was worked my company traded their options for options in the new company. Two years later everyone who had worked for the company we acquired was out of a job, and they had to decide whether or not to exercise their options in a company that wasn't publicly traded (which is madness, BTW - never, ever do that). I would have bought one of those mirrors on a stick and checked under my car every day if I'd been the CEO. But eventually he cashed out for a cool $15m.