Not since... I'm not sure the regulatory change, but if employees are able to sell back to the company or to private investors, resulting in cold hard cash in employee bank accounts, without the company going public, I'd say they are worth something. We can argue about how, without an IPO, the price isn't fairly decided upon, but having cold hard cash in the bank is nonetheless real.
I've never heard of being able to sell back stock options. You don't own anything with an option. You just have the right to buy at a price in the future.
I didn't say stock options. There is a mechanism through which SpaceX employees have been able to cash out some sort of financial object that they received, despite the company not being public.
The comment you were replying to ended with this:
> Stock options are only really, truly worth anything if they IPO.
fair. the important thing here is that IPO is not the only way to liquidity for early employees
Well, I'm not sure it is. People are pretty aware of salaries already for example. This was about stock options specifically.
Right so for options, when the employee leaves the company, they can convert them to shares, and then there are ways for them to sell those shares somehow, and it results in cash money somewhere down the road that isn't just the salary.