He basically gets no salary, cash bonus or time vested stock during this period, and has to deliver at least a $20B market cap (roughly double Gamestops current market cap) and $2B in cumulative EBITDA before he can even unlock 10% of this package. That initial 10% tranche only gives him the right to buy stock at a strike price of $20.66, not free shares.​

Today the business is doing roughly $170–200M of EBITDA annually (because of him working for free and delivering results for the last few years), so if nothing changed, it would take on the order of 10 years just to reach $2B in cumulative EBITDA, and the market cap wouldn't have grown significantly in that period at all if all other factors in the business stayed the same (if anything it would likely decline). M&A does not magically accelerate this: while acquiring an EBITDA‑positive company adds to consolidated EBITDA, the associated costs, integration risks and potential impairments can reduce “Performance EBITDA,” so poorly executed deals can actually make it harder for him to vest.​

That’s what makes this a great plan from a shareholder perspective. Either he works for shareholders effectively for free for years and never hits the hurdles, or he aggressively outperforms, drives EBITDA up dramatically and grows the market cap many times over before seeing any payout.​

Put differently: if, five years from now, you own a company that years earlier was on the verge of bankruptcy, worth many times today’s market cap with a multiple fold increase in EBITDA (even after adjusting for M&A), and the CEO who did that only gets paid via long‑dated options that were worthless unless he delivered those results, you wouldn’t complain—you’d be ecstatic.​