Details: $2MM/year in salary, the rest in performance based incentives. The $692MM figure is based on hitting all of the maximums (200% of a few different targets) and is the total for three years.
No, not at all. You're taxed on equity at fair market value when it vests. It's only after that when you get taxed at a lower rate on the capital gains.
This seems to say the opposite. If your employer grants you a statutory stock option, you generally don't include any amount in your gross income when you receive or exercise the option
The IRS page refers to Incentive Stock Options (ISOs) as "statutory" options. These are the "holy grail" because they allow you to avoid income tax at exercise and only pay capital gains when you sell.
ISOs have a 100k cap per year.
Further, the next line after your exceprt is "However, you may be subject to alternative minimum tax in the year you exercise an ISO", which is an income tax
You're thinking of realized capital gains, not tax on the exercise/grant. I don't think there is a way to dodge the latter, and you can't take out a loan or pass down options you never exercised or stocks you were never granted.
You should probably read the filing. First, these aren’t options, it is straight up stock and it does vest.
Second, even if they were options, they definitely vest, otherwise Pichai would never gain control to be able to use them as collateral for a loan.
What you might be thinking is that they never get exercised, which is when the person uses the option to actually buy the share. But even that isn’t as straightforward as you seem to be making it out to be. The money to actually pay the interest on those loans and that is usually done by selling stock acquired this way. And then that income is almost certainly subject to AMT as well as other special taxes in California.
Those share options need excising, which probably incurs income tax on the allocation Vs strike price. Then the shares are only worth something to inheritors if that company is doing useful work for its customers over an extremely long period of time. That is likely far more valuable than the tax going towards paying off the interest for a year on some vote-buying spending that happened 20 years prior.
No, these are RSUs, which - to your shock - are taxed as ordinary income upon payout (if that even occurs).
He did not get some custom stock now that will appreciate in value magically, if and only if he meets targets - or certain types of options can also act like this.
Even if GOOG stock grew so much, that this ended up being a $3B pay package, he'd be taxed as ordinary income on the full amount at payout - not even the reduced capital gains on the extra ~$2.7B in growth between agreement and payout.
Shocking? Taxed on payout is a discount versus ordinary stiffs who get taxed every year. A percentage taken from the increase of an amount every year, is more than the same percentage taken at the end; as the former foregoes the opportunity to earn a return on the amount taxed earlier. This is quite significant over longer periods. (I learned that from one of Warren Buffet's annual letters - I think he was explaining why insurance is a great business to be in, because the same effect applies to long-horizon insurance policies).
Getting a lump-sum payment at the end of three years is worse than getting paid incrementally, and is sort of the opposite of how insurance companies make money (which is taking frontloaded payments for long-term liabilities and investing the float).
No; just the difference between someone who gets a fixed number of shares and has to sell them (and pay the tax on them) that year, versus someone who is allowed to accumulate the shares and pay the tax at the end.
This may assume that there is more alpha in the shares than other investments you have access to, which is perhaps less true today. But it should probably be your position if you're CEO of the company...
All the Buffett letters are online, but I don't remember what year it was. If I get time I may find it and report back.
Why do you think they get to accumulate shares and pay tax at the end.
If options Sundar will have the pay income when exercised, or if RSU, they will have to pay income taxes when granted.
If you want to research the tax imlications, the relevant term is PSU (Performance Stock Units), which is the form almost all of these CEO incentives take.
(edited) My bad, I meant to type "options" not "shares". You get to choose when to exercise options. When tax is incurred will vary according to your jurisdiction.
I'm fairly sure that Sundar Pinchai will have paid someone to research the tax implications before negotiating this deal.
I don't think this would be considered capital gains if it's being paid to him. You typically pay income taxes on your income, if it's in the form of money given to you by your employer.
The IRS thinks that too. Stock grants, assuming they're EVER taxed (which isn't a given), are taxed at a lower rate than income. But as I indicated, most are never vested in the traditional sense, and are even lower than standard capital gains.
Stock grants (RSUs, like Google gives out) are taxed as ordinary income at the moment they vest.
If you sell them immediately, then you don't pay any additional capital gains tax, because there were no capital gains from the moment you got them to the moment you sold them.
If you hold on to them, you will eventually pay capital gains on any increase in value from the moment they vested until the moment you sell them.
Perhaps, once they are vested, you could take loans against them, to get some cash while avoiding selling them.
But no matter what, they are taxed at the moment you receive them, and again at the moment they leave your possession.
Can you say more? Why isn't it neutral or slightly positive? I would assume that a KYC provider would want to protect their reputation more than the average company. If I were choosing a KYC provider I would definitely want to choose the one that had not been subject to any privacy scandals, and there are no network effects or monopoly power to protect them.
Because KYC is evil in itself and if the linked article does not explain to you why is that then I certainly cannot.
> KYC provider would want to protect their reputation more than the average company
False. It is exactly the opposite. See, there are no repercussions for leaking customers data, while properly securing said data is expensive and creates operational friction. Thus, there are NO incentives to protect data while there ARE incentives to care as less as possible.
Bear in mind that KYC is a service that no one wants, anll customers are forced and everybody hates it: customers, users, companies.
I want KYC. I want AML. I want reversible transactions. I also want all of those things to be well regulated by a responsive and reasonable regulatory body.
They may have cases where they break down, but their net social impact is positive.
We're talking about LinkedIn, not banking. KYC and AML with respect to banks is a privacy tradeoff that is required by law, after public debate from legally elected representatives. With LinkedIn, it's none of that.
That’s what this is. It’s just defining two types of subagent relationship (spawned and forked) and providing the minimal MCP API for controlling them. It’s up to the LLMs when and how to use subagents.
It seems like AMZN has significant growth priced-in to the stock, but retail growth will become increasingly challenging as their market share increases.
> 95% of Claude and 5% of you, while still better than me (and your average Joe), is nowhere near the same jump from 95% Claude and 5% me.
I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure it is true. Take simonw and tymscar, put them each in charge of a team of 19 engineers (of identical capabilities). Is the result "nowhere near the same jump" as simonw vs. tymscar alone? I think it's potentially a much bigger jump, if there are differences in who has better ideas and not just who can code the fastest.
Yeah... and besides managerial skills, also product (using the word loosely) sense, user empathy, clarity of vision, communication skills. They've always been multipliers for programmers, even more so in this moment.
> For others, LLMs remove the core part of what makes programming fun for them.
Anecdotally, I’ve had a few coworkers go from putting themselves firmly in this category to saying “this is the most fun I’ve ever had in my career” in the last two months. The recent improvement in models and coding agents (Claude Code with Opus 4.5 in our case) is changing a lot of minds.
Yeah, I'd put myself in this camp. My trust is slowly going up, and coupled with improved guardrails (more tests, static analysis, refactoring to make reviewing easier), that increasing trust is giving me more and more speed at going from thought ("hmm, I should change how this feature works to be like X") to deployment into the hands of my customers.
An engineer on my team who is working on TUI stuff said that avoiding the flicker is difficult without affecting the ability to copy/paste using the mouse (something to do with "alternate screen mode"). I haven't used OpenCode (yet) but Google does turn up some questions (and suggested workarounds) around copy/paste.
reply