It's like anti-profit sharing. The employees own part of the company, but only for acquisitions and not for profits.
The employees do not own part of the company. They're promised a bonus in the (unlikely) instance of a major liquidity event.
Granting them that bonus in no way injures any other element of their comp. This is so much the case that Fried says most of his employees have probably forgotten they even have this bonus. That's not what you say when you're using a comp scheme as leverage with your employees.
You have no idea what 37signals people make, how profit sharing and incentive comp work, or why people choose to work there. But you feel just fine snarking about them because they don't fit into the "first engineering hire gets 5%" shoot-the-moon mold we normally talk about on HN.
Lamborghini Murcielago, 2010, premiered at $400,000 to $600,000.
However, when people are talking about a million dollar car they're most likely remembering the McLaren F1 which sold for $970,000 back in 1998.