My understanding is that the underwriting bank and early investors and institutional investors win first, then founders, after that early employees. Usually offloaded onto the robinhood crowd who excitedly buys in.
These are averages, but still!
In contrast, back when RedHat went public they reached out to everyone on the open source mailing lists, and gave everyone a few shares as thanks for the work they were benefiting from. I got some shares even though all I had done was post some free video format converters.
You do understand how individual slices decrease in size as you divide the pie more ways, right...?
It just, y'know, isn't a good argument for having everyone work for Anthropic ^_^
I've had several people I trusted destroy our relationship this way over the years.