Este tópico do Reddit explica:
At the end of season 2, a California tech company, Hooli, has about half of its contracts invalidated because they contained a non-compete cause.
In yesterday's premiere, the tech company was able to make a large amount of money by firing many of the employees with the invalidated contracts (under other pretenses) as they would not have to pay them severance packages or their vesting stock options. As such, the company is able to take back control of all these stock options upon the termination of these employees and make a decent profit.
Eles estão pagando aos funcionários para evitar que processem Hooli por ser demitido (eu suponho que os contratos Hooli são bastante restritivos e que isso funciona nos dois sentidos), e é realmente um movimento lucrativo.
O segmento aponta que esta história é bastante irrealista, se não for dizer :
The judge's ruling would have been that the noncompete clause was too broad and could not be enforced, not that the entire contract was invalid as a result.
Also, it's quite far fetched that a tech giant would eagerly fire 1/3 of its engineers for this reason. Firstly, every tech company is eternally starving for engineers. Secondly, the vesting of options doesn't cost the company any money; the creation of the shares merely dilutes the value of existing shares, so there is a cost to shareholders but it's not going to reach even 5% of the current market cap. The company realizes no revenue or increased margin as a result of cancelling employee stock options.
É uma daquelas coisas em que você precisa apenas seguir a lógica do programa e não esperar realismo.