You're the hired gun brought in by desperate private equity investors to save a dying company. You make a modest cash salary but are granted 2% ownership in the company by virtue of a giant stock grant, paid to you in the form of what are called RSUs, or Restricted Stock Units. At the time you joined the company, it was valued at $1 billion, so your 2% equity ownership is worth $20 million, notionally. Normally, you'd be required to pay tax on that grant the day it was given to you, so...you'd be given $20 million in unsellable-for-now stock and owe some $6-7 million in taxes payable in cash to the IRS, thankyouverymuch. But, in fact, your shares were granted to you with a string attached. You only own them, or "vest into them," at the rate of 1/4 per year.
So why should you owe taxes on all $20 million worth when you only get $5 million worth of notional stock value each year? Right. You don't. So you deploy your 83b election (yeah, it took us a while to get there), and you pay taxes on only the portion into which you have vested. Essentially, you get to dine free for a year, as far as taxes on that big stock grant go. If the company is really going to go bankrupt, after 363 days you can hand the keys and your CEO cowgirl keys back to the private equity company that bought the whoopee cushion maker in the first case, and after making the whoopee noise, say, "I tried. Sorry."
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Finance: What is stock based compensatio...7 Views
Finance a la shmoop What is stock based compensation While
investors want management with skin in the game when your
ceo has ninety eight percent of her net worth tied
up in the stock of the company that she's running
well presumably she runs it better or at least in
theory anyway So over time management has been paid in
equity ownership grants as well as in cash that is
company management gets paid in stock options and in stock
or rather shares of the company simply granted to them
in lieu of cash Why do companies not just pay
cash while they want management toe Have that whole ownership
thing going for them to act like owners You know
not just like union employees They want management with direct
stakes in how well or pa poorly the business per
forms in the long run and think about the dynamics
of a ceo getting paid even a relatively huge million
dollars a year in salary and nothing else that's it
well that ceo takes a company from four hundred million
dollars in sales and thirty million in profits to five
years later two billion dollars in sales and for three
Hundred million in profits that is the ceo made the
company at least ten times more valuable certainly ten times
more profitable and in five years that's really good But
that ceo just got their single million dollars a year
each year along the way Well that ceo would not
have financially participated personally in making shareholders so much wealthier
and that's not fair right If management of the company
makes huge returns for investors doesn't it seem right that
management should have huge returns for themselves and not just
a basic salary and male Maybe a little bit of
a bonus there too well some companies loan money at
low interest rates to ceos and other top execs so
that their ableto buy shares in the company leveraged well
Other companies just grant shares to management and still others
just grant stock options is kind of a spiff above
their cash compensation So yeah it's all about having skin
in the game which if you play football without sufficient 00:02:11.45 --> [endTime] padding is a definite possibility
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