If they keep screwing up the company, that stock may not be worth much.

Business 101 is that all funded companies aim to lose money in order to grow. As long as the growth rate is sufficiently high to justify the losses, this is considered good performance.

However, if that ratio goes the wrong way, then companies need to make internal adjustments to bring it back in line. That could be new or different pricing strategies, but it also usually involves some efficiency improvements and cost cutting.

This is why you have scenarios like this where the company is yes overall losing money each year (as intended), making more revenue than last year (good), and still cutting jobs (because they are still not at the right ratio of revenue growth to losses).

So the executives could be doing a completely fine job bringing the company back to the right path. With only trivial high level information like we have we can't tell. To really know if they are doing well or not you'd need to dive into the finances.

Going to the public markets and saying "we're selling $100M worth of stock to fill a gap in our revenue" is basically suicide. This is essentially what happened to SVB earlier this year; its different because they're a bank and there's bank runs to consider and the FDIC and etc, but they said "we need liquidity so we're selling a bunch of investments" and everyone went like "huh? are y'all ok? screw that we're out" and they died a week later.

SVB literally would have been fine, if you remove market psychology from the picture. But, that's a fallacy that everyone from You to highly experienced banking professionals make; ignoring market psychology.

People have this idea of stock having value; but it only has market value. Its a similar fallacy as believing that your investments are protected because you have stop-losses set; stock only has value because people believe it has value, and if corporate leadership takes action that would cause a lot of people to stop believing your stock has value, that stock doesn't have value anymore. Its not a house; its fairy dust.

niceice did not write that they did not count.

> Yes, but the top brass are racking in tens of millions

This characterization is obviously not accurate.

How much unrealized gains do you think Unity executives have from their stock compensation if their market cap graph looks like this:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/U/unity-software/m...

Err equity compensation is not taxed as capital gains unless there's growth.

Depending on how things are structured you pay taxes at different times but the value at grant is taxable as ordinary income. The only taxability difference is what to do with growth between grant and vest (and depends on when you pay the grant value's taxes).

This is a common misunderstanding and sometimes causes people working at big companies to hold onto their RSUs needlessly even though they've already been taxed as ordinary income. In the RSU case you can't elect for different treatment on grant-vest gains, and it's very unclear if you would even want to.

Equity compensation for earned income is subject to ordinary income tax, not capital gains tax.

Most of it is shares, not cash. Shares aren't comparable to cash here at all.

CMO is the best paid by far, and while it's still a big number, it's only $500k in salary - about the same as a senior Netflix engineer. All the rest is equity, which is only valuable if anyone wants to buy it.

If my understanding of finances is correct, the total compensation numbers you're citing are almost meaningless from a cash flow perspective. Most of the compensation is in stock, and issuing new stock as compensation doesn't really cost the company anything. Buying back the issued stock is where the stock compensation would have a negative impact on cash flow.