I m not sure I understand, MSFT was selling OTM puts to pay for options grants? How can this be legal? For an insider selling put options should be a sure way to make money .
Back in the day, DELL was also notorious for selling OTM puts to finance the cost of stock option grants (and make money too). I can remember being on the floor and seeing a ridiculous amout of size going up, like 20000 contracts, only to find out later that it was none other than DELL doing the selling. How was this legal ?? Who knows, just the way it was/is for the big guys. Vega
Larry spoke to the Yale graduating class in `00: http://www.satirewire.com/news/0006/satire-ellison.shtml
fully disclosed i assume it's legal. i guess no different than gates selling x million shares every quarter.
Anyone ever heard Lieberman? talk about Black-Scholes? Even more convoluted than Ellison. Lieberman supported all the tech firms a couple years back when FASB was considering it back then. Lobbying and Lieberman convinced Congress that expensing options via Black Scholes was ludicrous. Liebermand and all his experience and expertise felt they couldn't be properly valued. After Enron, when the public was in an uproar over options expensing, Lieberman took a backseat to avoid negative publicitiy from publicly being in favor of not expensing options. Classic politician flip-flop!
I suppose their argument is BS may not be 100% accurate, so we wouldn't want to use that and mislead investors. We'll just pretend they're worth zero, that will be less misleading.
To call Gates a college dropout is an insult to real college dropouts everywhere. Gate's father is worth like $20 mil and Gates himself had a multimillion dollar trust fund. He was attending one of the world's most elite universities and left because he saw a chance to get in on the ground floor of something. It's not even close to Apple Computer which would be the prototypical garage startup story. Those guys began with just had a few thou and Jobs was pretty much close to the profile of a dropout and had NO trust fund to lean on. It's kinda like calling Tiger Woods a dropout who goes on to make $100 million his first year out. Ellison is the sort of jerk who while praising dropouts would turn around and bemoan the lack of trained applicants.