Tech workers may be better off selling their company stock

Aug 15, 2026 09:01 PM - 1 hour ago 2

Microsoft Corp. signage during the Braveheart Bio Inc. first nationalist offering (IPO) astatine the Nasdaq MarketSite successful New York, US, connected Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026

One of the oldest rules successful tech salary still looks for illustration 1 of the smartest.

Levels.fyi, a institution that tracks compensation crossed the industry, precocious analyzed what would person happened to the aforesaid elder Microsoft package technologist salary package successful 2 scenarios.

In one, the worker sold their banal arsenic it vested and reinvested the money successful the S&P 500. That personification would beryllium astir $50,000 amended disconnected than the workfellow who held onto each of their Microsoft shares.

That's a reminder that moreover successful the AI era, diversification tin salary off. The biggest AI winners, for illustration Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic, person delivered bonzer gains.

But for galore tech employees, spreading investments beyond a azygous employer remains the safer, and sometimes much profitable, strategy.

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Alistair Barr is the writer of Business Insider's Tech Memo newsletter and the driving unit down the company's AI Insider franchise. Sign up here. Before that, he was Business Insider's Global Tech Editor and the Big Tech squad leader astatine Bloomberg, pursuing a reporting profession astatine The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Reuters, and MarketWatch. Alistair covers each things Big Tech, on pinch startups and task capital. He writes study and columns astir topics including AI, unreality computing, information centers, semiconductors, online search, e-commerce, EVs, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.