To sum up the arguments:
* Employment packages allow things a shareholder cannot do (functionally recall their investment), so the high volatility leads to higher package returns.
* FAANG equity grants (RSUs) are taxed at much higher rates
* Expected return is in fact higher on startup equity than FAANG equity (and you generally have no way to invest in the good startups directly aside from working for them).
Expected return is extremely misleading because it depends strongly on extraordinarily few outlier winners. Like when Jeff Bezos walks into a bar and now the average wealth of every person in the bar is over a billion dollars.
The modal return of common shares is $0.
unless I'm misunderstanding the argument, I dont see how those hypothetical returns could be considered "expected returns". startups which reach a place where employees can profitably cash out seem far too rare to reasonably expect a return at all, never mind a large one.
Since a person works for one company at a time (usually), and it can take 3-5 years or more for a startup to reach a place where the equity is worth something, this argument reads to me like "the returns on a Powerball win are so much higher than your projected lifetime earnings that playing the lottery is a smart financial move".
