NPR.

When Juan Edinandes came to work at SpaceX in 2013, employee's stock options were not front of mind.

You're like looking at the bottom line, like, how much you actually paint, how much

you could actually take home to feed the family, especially me, I had no experience with the stock options or the market or anything like that.

Eventually, Juan started to learn that shares in SpaceX were growing and growing in value.

You would go on your little web page and they would show the value kind of going up and

you get the emails, you're like,

huh, this is interesting.

This is starting to be worth something.

Tech firms aren't the only businesses that give their employees shares of the company.

In fact, sailors hunting whales hundreds of years ago would often get paid a share of the profit.

But startups giving all employees stock options is a

particularly Californian model that might explain why the state is a tech hub. This is the

indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods. And I'm Weylin Wong. Today on the show,

why do California tech companies love to give their employees stock options?

We learn what they are, why they might be the secret ingredient to Silicon Valley, and how they've changed Juan's life.

It's a year of paydays for tech employees.

SpaceX put shares of its company public mid-June.

Also, Anthropic and Open AI have announced their filed paperwork to possibly do the same too.

All three companies give their employees rights to buy shares of the company as part of their pay package.

And when the companies go public, it becomes a lot easier for those workers to cash out those shares.

We met one of them, Juan Hernandez. Juan was born in Mexico and raised in California. He started

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