The amount of money spent on stock-based compensation has for too long not been properly reported by many technology companies. Amazon and Facebook only began reporting their stock-based compensation as part of their regular financials using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) rather than via special “non-GAAP” reporting in their quarterly reports in the first quarter of 2016. Twitter, less profitable than the others, still doesn’t do so because it would show that far from having a profit, it is actually still operating at a loss when stock-based compensation is taken into account.
