Many of these employees were likely working for below market salaries after being sold on the high potential value of their options. I'm not arguing anything a

Many of these employees were likely working for below market salaries after being sold on the high potential value of their options. I'm not arguing anything about whether this is right or wrong (particularly in this case), but I believe this is also uncommon outside of tech. There are probably more analogous situations in e.g. law or sales, where you still have a clear employee relationship with the company but compensation is may not be a vanilla salary.