Maybe? I think the jury might still be out on whether equity compensation aligns incentives. Most equity compensation is treated same-as-cash for the perspective of taxation, and unless there are regulatory or contractual limits affecting holdings, it's commonplace for executives to offload shares as they vest as part of normal compensating activities just like your typical FAANG engineer does.
I was thinking it was interesting more from the socioeconomic perspective:
1. Senior execs are still "working for the man", even if their compensation is materially different from other employees, except in the case of founders of mega-caps.
2. From a socioeconomic lifestyle perspective, the primary differentiator is that senior executives can afford larger one-time costs/upfront costs due to their equity compensation, but have to maintain fairly similar ongoing costs to senior ICs. E.g. a senior exec can afford to buy a nicer house in SFBA because of Prop 13 limiting ongoing property taxes and the ability to shell out more up front to either avoid a mortgage or minimize payments, but their ongoing lifestyle expenses otherwise are most likely not materially different.
Basically, given the rhetoric, I was expecting that senior execs were essentially living in a totally different parallel world from senior ICs in tech, but it doesn't seem that this is really the case /other than/ probably social connections and society. In both cases these employees are highly compensated, but still ultimately employees, and neither is on a rocketship into the billionaire class. The difference between a billionaire and a 50-millioniare (senior exec) is about a billion dollars, the difference between a billionaire and a 3-millionaire (senior IC) is about a billion dollars.
Maybe my take is wrong, but I'd expect that is more about fringe benefits (e.g. access to corporate PJ) than direct compensation.
