Stock Options Haven\’t Vanished From Silicon Valley

While a major post-recession trend has been the shifting of stock option grants to restricted stock, many Silicon Valley executives are still getting a fair amount of  options, according to today\’s Wall Street Journal. Oracle\’s Larry Ellison leads the pack, with a whopping $57.4 million of options awarded in 2009. That\’s more than seven times the options granted to #2 on the list, Cisco CEO John Chambers. (We see many more yachts in Mr. Ellison\’s future.) Oracle also led the pack in total option grants given to executives, by a pretty wide margin.

In the third-place slot was NetApp, which awarded $7 million in options to new CEO Thomas Georgens. This is at least partially attributable to the new contract it had to work out when Georgens was appointed to the slot. Either way, it seems to be evidence that for some of the biggest Valley firms, restricted stock isn\’t looking as necessary anymore.