> by the time it finishes vesting. Right and during that vesting period if you had been paid cash you could have invested that money in a wide range of assets

> by the time it finishes vesting. Right and during that vesting period if you had been paid cash you could have invested that money in a wide range of assets that are both more liquid and are not perfectly correlated with your source of income. Now if we're talking a bonus that would be paid at the end of the vest period such that you can't invest that money until you would have vested anyway then stocks is theoretically going to have increased by the risk free rate, so it's expected value will be higher than the bonus (however it's much higher variance). Everyone has weird thoughts in their heads about RSUs people the last decade has been insane, and no one remember the last tech crash. The next one will be bigger and when you realize you are getting laid off at the same time that your RSU drop to near zero, it will feel like the variance might not be worth it.