Usually you get more options than you would RSU’s to compensate for this, but there’s still a risk/reward tradeoff. I have had stock options that ended up worth $0 because they were underwater. RSU’s would have been worth $non-zero.
The fact that RSU’s retain some value when the stock price goes down is highly relevant to a company like AirBNB which is undoubtedly struggling with the current situation. Also relevant may be that AirBNB isn’t a public company yet, making their shares relatively non-liquidifiable. This can pose problems both ways: if you get RSU’s in that situation you’ve received “taxable income” in the form of a non-liquidifiable asset and if you get options, you have to choose whether to buy stock in a travel accommodations company in the middle of a pandemic that just laid off 1/4 of their workforce, hence potentially incurring a very strong risk of loss.
As long as there's a real risk of loss you can avoid the taxable income and private companies with high valuations will do this to help employees avoid the bad tax situation on an illiquid asset (without need to have huge amounts of cash to exercise options).
Options similarly must expire after 10 years for similar risk of loss tax reasons (as I understand it).
I was told the RSUs are 'Facebook Style' because they were the first to pioneer this.
Even options with a low strike price can be problematic because tax law is dumb and charges tax on the spread before sale when you exercise (so you can end up with a huge tax bill on exercise without the ability to sell the shares to cover it). ISOs were supposed to prevent this, but AMT has not increased to match inflation over time and was never updated to accommodate for this case specifically so you still have to pay tax if you hit it (which you will because it's low). This wasn't considered originally because companies intending to IPO were not private >10yrs so expiration risk was not a serious problem and you could just wait for the IPO before exercise.
So with options even if you save the exercise cash you have to save a large amount for taxes depending on the spread, or deal with a bunch of loan shark like companies that will take a cut to front you the capital.
For most people RSUs are probably preferable unless you get in really early and can exercise all the options when the spread is zero (preferably with an 83b election for early exercise on non-vested shares).
RSUs (even facebook-style) are definitely taxable. With options, you're in control of when to take the tax hit. With facebook-style RSUs, the tax hit comes when the stock gets distributed (taxed as ordinary income) -- usually in the form of withholding some amount of shares.
---
Important to remember with RSUs in pre-IPO companies: even though you might get shares distributed at IPO, you're usually subject to a lock up. This is unfortunate because if you receive stock at IPO, you have to pay taxes at them -- so if your company IPOs at $50, then drops to $20 when the lockup expires, you have to pay taxes on the shares you received at $50 value even though you couldn't sell shares at that value.
My understanding is they're taxable, but only after they're liquid which makes it easier for the employee. I think most companies doing FB style do something fancy to avoid the distribution tax lockout issue (witholding some to cover tax or direct listing to avoid lockout).
The situation where you have a huge tax bill and no cash to pay it (or worse a huge tax bill and your illiquid stocks have crashed to $0) shouldn't happen, though I guess there's still a chance in the pathological case you describe? Not sure if that's avoidable.
The other thing I forgot to mention is that if you do risk all this cash on option exercise/taxes and your company does go to $0 you do get to take a $3000 AMT tax credit each year until you die (but maybe only if you don’t have kids or something, can’t remember) - it’s not great.
Scenario A: RSUs have an expiration date. RSUs you own expire before the company hits a liquidity event.
Scenario B: RSUs do not have an expiration date but the company goes bankrupt/dissolves and never hits a liquidity event.
Is one of these scenarios taxable and the other one not? One of my biggest fears about joining a startup (pre covid) was scenario A happening.
Scenario A there’s no tax, but the company is failing to hold up their end of the bargain and this would probably lead to everyone quitting or some sort of RSU regrant.
Scenario B I think you’re taxed when they vest. If there’s no IPO then you don’t get any money.
This is why you'll see recently IPO'd companies reporting large one-time equity compensation numbers.
edit: s/vesting/settling. I believe "settling" is the term actually used.
Brokerages will typically set things up so you can automatically sell enough shares to cover your tax liability as soon as they vest.
Typically you have to amend your cost basis on your tax return for this to actually work, for some stupid bureaucratic reason. Probably a conspiracy to make people who get equity compensation buy the more expensive version of TurboTax.
E.g.: you'll get Math.floor(x * (1-bonus_tax_rate)) shares and will owe no income tax (unless your marginal tax rate is over the bonus tax rate). After that point, you'll only owe taxes on possible capital gains from price at the time of vest to the time you sell.
Options, however, can have downside: tax can't be paid with the excerised option itself, because you can't sell the exercised option. So you have to pay the tax out of pocket. Meanwhile, the company can go under, and render the options worthless: you've lost the tax amount. If the company's valuation increases significantly, the taxes can be fairly significant. But you also can't just wait to see if the company succeeds, either: every company I've been at forces you to exercise within a certain amount of time if you leave the company.
It's a call option, with no premium paid, a strike price specified [typically the last 409A valuation or other better proxy of current value], subject to vesting [cannot exercise before this date], but with an expiration some number of years into the future (typically 10 years from the date of the grant).
So you had it basically correct, except they don't expire at the vesting date.
More like a $50 bill or the option to buy a $100 bill for $25
