It's comical how much of modern startup compensation is gymnastics around taxes.
My understanding is that the most basic problem is if the startup gives you stock that's viewed as income and you will need to pay tax on an illiquid asset, and ISO/NSO/RSU/409a's are resulting from various elaborate schemes to give you stock-like upside tomorrow without having to pay taxes on an illiquid today.
In some ways that's true. Taking your list in order:
1. ISOs do have special tax treatment, but it only comes into play if you exercise them and the shares have increased in value (and it gets complicated if they've increased so much that they trigger the alternative minimum tax). Good companies though will let you exercise as soon as you join, so there's no tax at all until you sell. ISOs do nothing in that case.
2. NSOs are basically just standard call options. Most companies still force you to exercise or abandon your options after leaving, but good companies will convert your ISOs to NSOs and give you 10 years from the original grant to exercise them.
3. Startups doling out RSUs use triggers instead of handing out the shares directly (a taxable event), which is absolutely a tax dance. You also need to read the fine print on these, because some companies are evil and set it up so that you lose the RSUs if you leave.
4. The 409A is just a process for valuing the company. Keeping the value of the common shares low can be useful for taxes when the company uses options (less likely to trigger the alternative minimum tax), but that's not really why we do it. When a company uses RSUs, on the other hand, pricier is often better. Which is the natural progression of things anyway. The earlier a company is, the bigger the delta between the common and preferred share prices. Later on they converge, and when the company goes public, the preferred shares actually convert to common.
Seems like it, the parent poster is almost implying there's an element of underwriting the transaction/house for which 2% is not unreasonable (Title insurance is in the 1% (or a bit less) range in the US I believe)
> The Settlement Administrator will assign each Authorized Claimant one point for each month in which the Authorized Claimant had an activated Facebook account during the Class Period.
Just be mindful of the "Unauthorized Visitor Fee" --
“Whether or not related to Consumertronics business, any visit to our facilities which is not with our clear, written, prior permission, or so permitted by us based on a fraudulent, erroneous or deceptive representation by the visitor, is an unauthorized visit which automatically results in a non-refundable Unauthorized Visitor Fee (UVF) for each visitor and for each visit for which the visitor assumes total personal liability for paying. The amounts of the UVFs are set by us based on our perception of the real and potential injury to us caused by the visitor and visit, as well as the amount of our time and inconvenience for the unauthorized visit. The UVF amounts may vary between $0 and $1,000,000+ per visitor per visit. UVF fees are independent and separate from all other fees, charges and costs the unauthorized visitor may be required to pay.”
Just tried this on macOS but it must be a different 'units' command as it won't accept that input. :-(
However I just discovered that if you hit command spacebar and paste that into the spotlight search it gives the right answer! Spotlight has always done simple unit conversions but it didn't used to be able to do calculations with units in them. I wonder when that was introduced...
Well structurally taking Twitter private has increased expenses by $1bil (the interest on loans) against last year's ~$6bil in revenue, so that alone is going to change the health of the company.
On top of that Musk has given guidance that he expects revenue to fall from $6b in 2022 to $3b in 2023. (This seems dramatic TBH)
I don't think there were revelations (this is all public info), the transaction just changed the fundamentals.
