A gift with conditions Apple offers rewards to its employees of up to 180 thousand dollars
Apple offered some of its engineers big stock bonuses ranging from $50,000 to $180,000 in an attempt to prevent them from heading towards its competitors, specifically Meta.
Last week, according to a Bloomberg report, the company gave some engineers in its silicon design, hardware, software suite selection, and process groups bonuses outside known regulations, which are issued as private equity, according to people familiar with the matter. The shares mature after 4 years, providing an incentive to stay with the iPhone maker.
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Many engineers received roughly $80,000, $100,000, or $120,000 in stock.
Rumors have recently emerged that Meta, owned by Mark Zuckerberg, is developing its own smartwatch. It has hired about 100 Apple engineers in the past few months, so Apple decided to secure key employees from the social media giant.
The latest to join Meta was public relations chief Andrea Schubert, according to the Power On newsletter, run by Mark Gorman.
"It was dead, with Oculus, the market leader in headphones, so such action makes sense as Apple approaches the launch of its new glasses," Gorman wrote.
However, not all Apple engineers received the bonuses, and those who were excluded said the "selection process is arbitrary," according to Bloomberg.
According to people familiar with the matter, this type of bonus is very rare at Apple, where employees usually receive a base salary and a cash bonus.
Sources told Bloomberg that it was an "atypical and amazingly timed" bonus awarded to about 10-20% of engineers in the appropriate departments.
Apple appears to be not paying enough attention to the retail employees who staged a company-wide strike on Christmas Eve, demanding better wages, paid sick leave, mental health care and better protection for employees in the store.
Those retail employees also demanded the distribution of masks to all workers and sanitizing stations and to consumers looking to shop inside the Apple Store, and a ban on loitering inside the buildings to help mitigate the spread of the Corona virus.
Yannick Parrish, a former Apple employee, admitted that the number of participants in the strike was only a small percentage of the company's workforce of 80,000 people.
Elon Musk accused of disrupting the Chinese space station in orbit
Chinese netizens criticized billionaire Elon Musk on Tuesday after Beijing said its space station was forced to take evasive measures on two occasions to avoid collision with its SpaceX satellites, dealing a blow to the businessman's reputation in a country where Tesla cars have met. Electric incubator environment.
According to a document that Beijing sent at the beginning of December to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs in Vienna, the Chinese space station Tiangong twice, in July and October, was forced to carry out evasive maneuvers in order to avoid a “collision” with satellites of Stellarlink Group, a subsidiary of SpaceX.
The document indicated that the satellites moved on both occasions to orbits that prompted the space station operators to change their course.
Beijing said it had taken the measures "to ensure the safety of astronauts in orbit."
The Tiangong station, which means "heavenly palace", is the latest achievement in China's efforts to become a major space power after it managed to send a rover to Mars and probes to the moon.
Its core unit entered orbit earlier this year, and the plant is expected to be fully operational by 2022.
Social media users in China have criticized Musk and his companies over the incident.
One user wrote: "It is ironic that the Chinese buy Tesla and contribute large sums of money, so that Musk can launch Starlink, and then almost crash into the Chinese space station."
The Starlink constellation includes more than 1,700 satellites that aim to provide the Internet to most parts of the Earth.
Another said, "Get ready to boycott Tesla," echoing China's common response to foreign brands deemed incompatible with Beijing's national interests.
Some speculated that Washington would have imposed sanctions if the roles were reversed.
"Why don't we do what they're doing?" said one social network user.
California-based SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
Although Musk is widely admired in China, Tesla, which sells tens of thousands of vehicles in the country each month, has had its image dented this year after a series of accidents, scandals and data storage concerns.
But Tesla is still very popular in China, as one in four cars sold in the country is a Tesla model.