Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) are taxed when the shares vest, not when you sell them - so he has to report all of them as income at the end of the year. You pay income taxes on the value of the stock when it vests. If you hold onto it and the price drops, you may never recover what you paid in taxes. Most recipients will sell RSUs as they vest, or at least enough to cover the tax burden. This is a non-event.
Exactly. Not only are they taxed when the shares vest, but
this is treated like a paycheck - withholding taxes are taken out. Shares are sold automatically to cover those taxes, before a single share is given to the employee.
There are no capital gains taxes paid on the stock sold to cover taxes, it's all treated as ordinary income - salary. Capital gains taxes (or a tax loss) will be paid sometime in the future, if/when they sell any of the shares that remain.
This is true in the U.S., for any corporate employee, of any corporation, who gets a restricted stock grant.
You can't know if the "rats are abandoning a sinking ship," unless you know whether they sold a portion of the shares that remained
after taxes. The number of shares remaining after taxes is not too hard to approximate, assuming a highly-compensated employee is in the maximum federal and state tax brackets. However, a news report that says, "He got X shares, Y were sold to cover taxes, he sold Z shares to diversify his investments, and kept whatever remained" is totally lacking in speculation and innuendo, and such reporting does not capture eyeballs.
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He basically sold everything he owns at Apple because he knows what products they'll release and how that will affect stock prices. The iPhone 7S (also known as the 6SSS) is gonna be awesome!
Nope,
he didn't sell a single share. He received a grant of 525,000 shares. The law in the US requires that withholding taxes be collected
prior to the employee receiving whatever remains (like a pay check). 335,000 remained after taxes were withheld. All 335,000 were placed in his Family Trust. That means he gave them to his heirs.
For those interested, that means withholding taxes were 36%. That would be Federal taxes, not state.
We don't know what will happen to those shares in the future. By placing them in a family trust, they've been taken out of public view. He's not allowed to make investment decisions for that family trust (if he does, that means he has "constructive ownership" of the property, and the law continues to treat that property as if he owns it outright). So, if all is open and above board, it means the sale of those shares, if any, won't be made with insider knowledge--the whole rats and ship scenario is off the table.
