New Wisdom Report
Editor:flynne
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[Introduction to New Wisdom]NVIDIA employees have gained huge wealth through stock plans, which has triggered a trend of “semi-retirement.” Some employees tend to rely on stock awards, resulting in inactive work, which also poses challenges to company management.
Can even a mid-level employee become a multi-millionaire? Don’t you think it’s a little incredible!
A recent tweet from Barron's senior writer Tae Kim vividly illustrates the amount of wealth that can be gained from helping to grow a successful company.
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Kim said that a “mid-level” NVIDIA employee (not an engineer) had maximized the use of the Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) for 18 years and firmly grasped this “green gold.”
When he left Nvidia, he had accumulated a fortune of $62 million, so the company stock plan is a good incentive for employees.
Many netizens said it was incredible, this is enough to buy a very nice house!
Some rational netizens also said that this is a completely normal welfare benefit. Because they caught up with the soaring stock prices, they gained such a large amount of wealth.
It was a reasonable gamble that paid off well.
No matter what, such a huge fortune is very exciting! (Whether you are excited or not, I am very excited anyway)
Nvidia claims that their ESPP plan is the best in the industry, allowing employees to use 10-15% of their salary to purchase company stock at a 15% discount to the market price.
The lucky or, more accurately, smart employee is said to have left Nvidia with a pile of stock worth $62 million.
It must have been difficult to access some of that cash from time to time while holding the shares, but Kim asserts that this person “never sold during his tenure.”
Needless to say, $62 million is a considerable amount of “retirement money.” However, not everyone who took advantage of Nvidia's ESPP during its rocket-fueled stock price rise in recent years was able to reap such generous returns.
An early NVIDIA employee (engineer) once owned one million NVIDIA stocks. But unfortunately, the employee had to sell his Nvidia stock to cover the loss, ultimately resulting in a “$500 million mistake” because his broker used another stock as collateral and the stock fell 90%. .
Curtis Priem and Nvidians’ semi-retirement model
This may not be the first time we hear about the treatment of Nvidia employees. It was once reported that Nvidia co-founder Curtis Priem cashed out early.
Curtis Priem graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1982 with a degree in electrical and computer engineering and worked as a senior engineer at PC company Vermont Microsystems and later as a hardware engineer at electronic test equipment company GenRad.
An inventor with nearly 200 patents, he helped design the first-ever graphics processor for PCs in the early 1980s and later co-founded the semiconductor company Nvidia, where he spent time Ten years as its first chief technology officer.
If Priem continues to hold Nvidia stock, its value will exceed $70 billion. However, this “loss” does not seem to matter to Priem. After all, he has a personal wealth of approximately US$30 million. (I have a lot of money and don’t care about this)
However, Nvidia seems to have a problem. There are reports that most of Nvidia's wealthy employees are in a semi-retirement state.
What is semi-retirement?
Conventional wisdom holds that retirement is when people stop working altogether. Semi-retirement, on the other hand, is the transition phase to full retirement, during which people typically reduce their working hours and either work for their original employer or take on a new part-time job.
NVIDIA employees became rich and happy from the company's stock purchase plan, sparking the “semi-retirement” trend.
Previously, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a speech on the issue that some employees within the company seemed to be in a “semi-retired” state. He likened Nvidia's work to a “voluntary movement,” urging each employee to act as a “CEO” of his or her time.
There are also reports that tensions among Nvidia employees stem from the huge increase in the company's stock that has made many employees rich.
Although Nvidia's pro-employee culture has historically avoided layoffs in favor of team transfers, this may lead to a phenomenon known as “rest and vest,” in which employees are idle at work, waiting for stocks Reward expires.
They may not put much energy or effort into their work, but instead rely on stock awards they have received or will receive. This can lead to employees showing a dismotivated attitude at work because they believe their financial goals have been met and no more effort is needed for the company's success.
Nvidia still faces certain challenges in balancing the company's management style and maintaining employee motivation in the face of increased pressure from competitors.
References:
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-employees-make-fortunes-and-foul-ups-with-their-stock-options-astory-of-millionaire-winners-and-losers