No wonder the investors want Apple to expense those options.

They will be. The topic of expensing options has to do when a company expenses them, not whether they get expensed or not. The current (previous) way of doing this is to expense them when they are exercised, not when they are given. The argument is that you don't know the price of the option when its given, as the actual cost isn't determined until they are exercised. The problem some people have is that you don't see these on the balance sheet on the quarterly reports, so the company looks like its in better shape then it really is.

On the other hand, writing them off when they're given (even though they may never be exercised) gives as false of an impression of a company losing money and verge of bankruptcy, reducing their ability to get funding.

Whether you buy any of that, I don't know and don't care. I'm not even sure I buy it (hey, if analysts are smart enough to ignore the one-time gains/losses on a quarterly report, they should be smart enough to determine how stock options are affecting the so-called bottom line as well). But that's just what the deal is here.


So, Apple's next quarterly report should be showing this up as an expense. This could be seen a couple of ways. One, they all know the stock price is way overpriced, won't reach this plateau for a while again, so they all want to sell to get some porift (can't blame them for that). On the other hand, they might think the price is going to stablize here so Apple's bottom line won't be affected as much (yeah, right).

Big wigs like this can't just decide to sell Apple whenever they like (like you or me). They have to file with the SEC, and go through a bunch of hoops. So this was all setup weeks to months ago (before Apple started to shoot up and up). So don't think they are trying to offload stock because Apple is at a high. This is really no big deal.