alt Hacker NewsThey were likely paid out at the same time other investors were when Noam et al went to Google.
The fact that the legal entity has no money doesn't mean they didn't get paid.
You can figure out a bit about what likely happened by what is not happening. NVIDIA/Groq are being sued for leaving former employees out of the acquisition: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/05/nvidia-groq-deal-stockholder...
Which to me implies that in that case, at least current employees were taken care of, and the court will likely force the former employees to also be taken care of because Delaware law doesn't like it when you discriminate in ways that were not spelled out ahead of time.
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I swear this is what's so risky about AI startups, they've completely changed the risk/reward calculus that we all used to be okay with.
You join a company, are granted ISOs/RSUs/etc, and they matter at some point when a liquidity event happens.
Now the liquidity events are "acquihireasitions", the execs and senior AI/ML eng get buyouts to go to a new company -- everyone else: regular eng, designers, PMs, marketers, recruiting, etc. everyone else is just left with nothing.
I wouldn't join an AI startup unless I was on the ML side, and I'm not: I'm just a "regular ass product engineer" so screw me I guess.
There was a Supreme Court case that essentially established that Common stockholders can be practically ignored as part of leadership’s fiduciary duty. It revolved around an ex-employee suing for compensation for Common stock after a merger that paid out the CEO and preferred shareholders, leaving stockholders zero.
This is also partially why your common stock options can be valued significantly less than the price the company value would imply: because it’s not an even share in the business.