[btilly]

Not true at all.

Anyone hired after their valuation was fairly high who was given options would be given options with a high strike price. If the stock never gets there, those options are worth nothing.

A large part of the people who were hired in the last year, with apparently generous option packages, now have Facebook on the resume and no golden handcuffs holding them. And a lot of other employees who had golden handcuffs are going to be thinking about places to bail. This could give them a significant retention problem.

[epistasis]

No, that's not right (might as well make it three comments in a row :)

THere's no strike price on recent Facebook employee's equity; they receive RSUs, not stock options.

Edit: here's an article describing it a bit more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-ipo-stock-price-recr... Due to many different employee's RSUs vesting in very small time window, there could be a whole bunch of other problems with flooding the market, as well as the and tax difficulties for employees that can't spread out their RSU income over multiple years.

[btilly]

I didn't realize that they were using RSUs. That does change the equation.

I would be curious what a tax lawyer would say about AMT liability. But AFAIK you're right, there is no problem.