I think you are under a misconception as to how this work. Let's say Meta wants to give this person 100M in stock, they don't have to buy 100M worth of stock when the option vests. What they do is, go into their accounting software and look at how many shares they have, let's call this amount X. And they will increase the total number of shares from X to X+Y where Y is worth 100M at current valuation. They never need to spend any cash to do this. It's literally money they can print whenever they want.
Sure, but it's highly liquid stock in a publicly listed company. If someone asked me if I want 99M in cash or 100M in Meta stock, I would rather take 100M in Meta stock. That's how liquid it is. You seem to treat Meta stock as if it was some cryptocurrency with daily volume measured in thousands.
On the receiving side sure, if the contract is written such that you are actually allowed to sell the shares easily, which often you are not.
My main point is that $250M sounds like a huge number, and that it shows how extreme the value of AI is seen. But that's exactly the point. They want to be perceived as thinking AI is worth extreme amounts of capital, suggesting it will ROI even more. Otherwise they wouldn't be spending $250M on one guy right? But here comes the catch, they don't think that one person is worth $250M, they can print money for free and claim this guy is worth this much without having to pay for it. Effectively diluting existing shareholder value. This whole thing works because Meta is seen by investors as a growth stock, they have 10-100x larger earnings to share values than mature stocks like Ford. They are printing money to be able to print more money in the future. Follow up reading [1]
Since Meta Platforms' stock is highly liquid, it does not matter much (except maybe for computing taxes) whether Meta sells stock and gives 100M in cash to the employee or gives the employee stock, which the employee then converts into cash.
In either case, the fact that the stock was created is reported to investors, and investors know that the creation reduces the value of every existing share of Meta, which is the feedback mechanism which restricts how much money or value Meta can get out of the creation of new shares of its stock.
https://money.stackexchange.com/a/155106 the argument is that it doesn't dilute the stock because the thing they bought makes the company that much more worth. If they trade newly created shares for a metric ton of gold, that logic seems quite plausible, but it get's more sketchy when things like IP or companies are bought. Or as in this case even more sketchy, where I'd argue this one person will not raise the value of Meta by $250M, effectively scamming the investors.
