Zilincik v. Tesla CA1/2
These appeals require us to decide a single question: when, several years after its founding but before it became practically the household name that it enjoys today, a pioneering automotive startup company called Tesla, Inc. offered stock options to its employees in its standard offer letter of employment, what was the vesting schedule of the stock options? Specifically, could newly hired Tesla employees exercise a portion of their stock options immediately, beginning on the very first day they started working at Tesla, or was there a “cliff” that required them to work for one year before they could start to do so?
These two consolidated cases involved 47 former Tesla employees who sought redress for Tesla’s allegedly wrongful refusal to allow them to exercise their stock options when their employment ended after less than one year.
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