Trade Desk (TTD) shareholders have had a rough year. The ad-tech company’s stock is down 66%. Last week the company handed CEO Jeff Green and much of his staff a fresh start on their stock options. It cut the price they’d pay to exercise them, by as much as 85%. Shareholders approved it. Sort of.
Here’s how options work. A company gives you the right to buy its stock later at a set price, the strike. If the stock climbs above the strike, you profit. If it falls below, your options are underwater and pay nothing for now. Trade Desk’s new strike is $12.26. The stock closed Friday at $13. That one change turned deeply underwater options into ones slightly in the money, as of Friday’s close. The Journal’s Theo Francis reports that 1.6 million of Green’s options got the new price. So did 1.6 million held by other senior executives. So did options on just over 12 million shares spread across more than 2,300 other employees.
The vote that wasn’t
Shareholders approved the repricing last week, nearly 2-to-1. Look closer. Green holds just over 50% of the voting power, mostly through supervoting shares. His shares made up about 98% of the yes vote. Take him out, and VerityData says the measure would’ve failed with about 95% opposed. “The optics are bad,” wrote VerityData analyst Amy Pessetto. A Trade Desk spokesman called the move “a more disciplined choice than issuing new awards.” Everyone must stay employed until at least April 19 to use the new price.
Green has felt the drop too. The slide has cut as much as $2.7 billion from his stake since mid-2025. He still holds just under $700 million. In September, the board also handed him a special award of options on seven million shares at $14.97. Those vest if the stock reaches $18 to $105. The same month, the company said it would lay off 15% of a workforce that stood at 3,800 at the end of 2025. Repricing is rare. VerityData counts around 220 cases at U.S. public companies since 2021. About a third of them left the top executives out.
Our read
File this under Investments/Risk · IN04, in the folder marked ownership versus control. When you buy a share of Trade Desk, you own a slice of the profits. You don’t own a matching slice of the say. Dual-class stock, where insiders hold shares with extra votes, splits those two things apart. Outside holders here voted about 95% no, by VerityData’s count, and lost. That’s the deal they signed up for, whether they read it or not. Plenty of good companies have founders in control. The point is to know it before you buy, so a vote like this one never surprises you. Trade Desk isn’t a house holding, and nothing here changes that.
The concrete thing in your plan is the handful of single stocks you own outside your index funds. This week, pull up the proxy statement for the biggest one. That’s the booklet a company sends before its yearly shareholder vote. Search it for the words voting power. If one person or family holds more than half, you’re a passenger. The ride can still be fine, as long as you know it. A plan review is where we read the fine print on a dry day, so the first drop of rain is never the first time you look.