The caveats start immediately. Several commenters note that rank-and-file ICs at both companies receive relatively modest RSU grants compared to what you'd see at hyperscalers. One commenter put it plainly: managers who held are set for life; individual contributors less so. ESPP participants with a two-year lookback period fared better — that program, if Micron's structure held, would have captured significant upside.

There's also the timing problem. A recurring theme in the thread is people who sold early: employees who dumped shares after the WD-Sandisk split, family members who cashed out Micron at $8 a share in the late 1990s. Paper gains require someone to have held, and memory-chip companies have historically been brutal cyclical stocks. Plenty of people got burned on earlier runs and didn't stay around for this one.

It's worth noting what this story is and isn't: this is a Reddit thread reacting to stock price movement, not a company announcement. The actual equity structures at Micron and Sandisk — vesting cliffs, grant sizes by level, ESPP enrollment rates — aren't public at the granular level needed to say how many employees meaningfully benefited.

What does seem true: some long-tenured employees and managers who held through the volatility are in genuinely good shape. Whether that's a retirement-level windfall or a nice bonus depends on how many shares they actually had, and that number varied a lot by tenure and title.