One of the most popular reads this week came from a blog entitled, “The beautiful ex-Alibaba Group senior management never had Valentine’s Day”, which generated intense levels of discussion in fintech circles.
In the article, a start-up chief executive called Judy Wang Han claimed she was an ex-Alibaba Group senior executive with an annual salary of several million yuan and a share option of over 10 million yuan (US$1.49 million) .
To make it more convincing, she even uploaded a picture of herself taken with chairman Jack Ma Yun.
Not everyone at the Alibaba Group was pleased by her article. The head of Ant Financial’s public relations subsidiary wrote asking people in his friends circle, “In general, many ex-colleagues will tend to exaggerate their resumés when they join another start-up, but there is a limit. How can Wang Hang be considered a senior manager?”
Wang fired back with a post that showed her options record and how she arrived at her calculation of over 10 million yuan.
When she left the company, her share option was priced at 190 yuan. Had she not left the company, her 39,000-share option, if exercised, would have gone to nearly 20 million yuan assuming the share price went up to 500 yuan in three years.
This makes for a lot of assumptions, given that it is hard to predict the future valuation of Ant Financial, the biggest unicorn in China with a US$150 billion valuation as of the end of 2018.
Wang might also have been trying to confuse the issue of the future value of her options, since she no longer owns the options in any case.
But at least Wang has already benefited from her blog going viral, never mind that half of it discussed facial masks. Wang said her skin’s condition deteriorated while she spent 10 years with Alibaba, which might be a small price to pay for the company making her financially independent.
Chinese version: 阿里離職「女高管」稱損失千萬期權
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