Big Tech's doubled share prices are funding the exits its equity was meant to prevent

Appreciation changes the price of both halves of a grant. The unvested portion gets more expensive to abandon. The vested portion gets better at paying for the abandonment. Shares of Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have all at least doubled since the end of 2022 ^[8], so on a grant issued around then, the vested shares an employee can sell and the unvested shares she gives up are each worth at least twice their grant-date value ^[20].

Layoffs remove the employee from the decision. Rob Waters was cut from Google last year and encouraged the next day to apply for an AI sales specialist role, which the company then offered him at a six-figure salary ^[1][2]. "All the equity that was unvested was gone," he said. "I went from making very high six figures to zero." ^[5][6] He did not take the job; he cofounded Kanawai AI instead, forfeiting about a few hundred thousand dollars in unvested stock ^[3][7]. "I killed myself working and dedicating myself, and then all I got to show for it was getting let go," Waters, 42, said ^[4].

Timing decides who is held and who is free, and the employee does not choose the timing either. One former Meta employee joined in 2022 after the shares had fallen sharply, received what Business Insider described as a "boatload" of restricted stock units on the cheap, and watched the stock surge ^[16]. A former Microsoft employee in her 60s lost her job last year after more than a decade, held a large position, and started to doubt she could retire on it once the shares dropped ^[17].

Everyone quoted here is someone who left. Business Insider's account rests on individual interviews and does not include attrition figures for any of the five companies ^[22]. A former Amazon employee in the same reporting called the salary-and-stock package lucrative, and said it felt more predictable than the bonus-heavy structure at her previous employer ^[18].

For a comp committee deciding this quarter, the practical point is narrower than the headline case. A retention model that counts unvested value as a hold is assuming the employee picks the departure date. Julie Zhu, who resigned from Apple last year after nearly four years, did pick it, and gave up the remaining quarter of a grant she had never sold any part of ^[10]. Waters did not pick it. Only one of those two exits counts as voluntary turnover.

For the decade, the competing bid has changed. Yousuf Imran set aside $350,000 after roughly six years at Google before leaving in April to build an AI sales tools company ^[13]. "If the only way to get real upside in this AI moment is equity, at some point, you ask yourself whether the equity should be in your own company," he said ^[14].