When they give you those options and if you exercise right away they are taxed at whatever the current market value of the stock is, as income. It's only once

When they give you those options and if you exercise right away they are taxed at whatever the current market value of the stock is, as income. It's only once you exercise and hold that you get the LTCG tax rate on the rise of price of the stock when you sell. If they are structured as ISO options, then you will hit the AMT tax rate very very quickly and at the minimum pay %28 tax. If you live in CA, there is another %8 CA AMT tax that will apply on top of that I think. And if you start hitting the AMT tax rate, the 'tax credit' you get from paying state taxes starts going away too! So I guess if you play a lot of AMT shenanigans with ISO stock options, you can reduce the tax load to %28-36, which is an improvement I guess. But ISO stock options are golden handcuffs and pretty bad when your in a private company. If I'm wrong, me and whole bunch of stock compensated engineers would be very interested to learn how we are wrong.