this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1axll4s/reddit_files_to_go_public_reveals_that_it_paid/
Spez got paid, according to that, $193,000,000 last year as CEO.
reddit "never turned a profit".
I can't imagine the corruption/anti-integrity required to reconcile those 2 facts.
How come he isn't in jail, for fraud??
The article in the reddit post you shared is misleading. According to the S1 filed with the SEC, spez’s current base pay is $450,000; in 2023 he got roughly $792,000 in performance-based bonuses. The rest of that 193 million is options.
Base pay is a meaningless figure in tech. Total comp is all that matters. The true high rollers intentionally keep their base pay low to dodge taxes. This doesn’t mean they aren’t still getting and using this money, it’s just an intentional straw man to allow them to make this exact argument.
Except that Spez can't convert those options until some time after IPO and probably only in a staggered way.
You don’t need to exercise your stock options to access their value. It’s common practice to take loans out against their value, which allows you to access your money effectively tax free by instead paying interest against the loan. This is (again) a fairly commonplace practice used to make collecting tax difficult, and allow them to make the argument to regulators that they aren’t actually being paid that much, it’s totally just options they would never sell off. That’s why C suite has such a “burn everything to the ground, as long as our stock price goes up” mentality, because if it doesn’t, they have to start worrying about interest on their loans— because they have fairly low liquidity (percentage wise).