[isubkhankulov]

There have been at least a half dozen of these deals in the past 1-2 years including Google “licensing” CharacterAI to pull their founders back into Google as valued employees.

In the deal mentioned above: my guess is that preferred class shareholders and common shares got paid out but the common shareholders had such a low payout that it rounded down to zero for most employees.

This can happen even in a regular acquisition because of the equity capital stack of who gets paid first. Investors typically require a 1x liquidation preference (they get their investment back first no matter what).

[Eridrus]

Liquidation preferences are typically 1x these days, so they only matter when companies are sold at fire sale prices where basically nobody is making any money.

The deals are all weird so it's hard to really know what's happening, but if Groq gets $20b, I don't see how common stock holders don't get paid.

[SecretDreams]

Special dividend to priority class and retain the rest to grow the remaining sham company?

I've seen some discussion that paying out normal employees might look more like an acquisition on paper which they may want to avoid for ftc reasons. I've also seen some discussion that this is a quid pro quo to the trump family to get Nvidia back into China (jr. bought in at the September financing round..).

Lots of speculation in general, including why nvda chose to spend 20bil on this.