Brex has been around for a long time, so employees will have been issued stock options with vastly different exercise prices.

Early employees' options will have value, but more recent options are likely underwater.

These days, most employees getting nothing out of the deal is par for the course for acquisitions, unfortunately. The acquisition price is almost never exchanged directly for shares in the company as implied, often a chunk of it is kept for key personnel retention, etc. Typically just enough goes towards the share purchase to make investors happy, and the rest is structured as incentives for founders and key execs with milestone payouts. That‘s the set of people with leverage towards making the acquisition happen, so that‘s who gets paid.

If you‘re just a regular employee with some options, and the acquirer doesn‘t want to keep you on, you should expect nothing.

While I don't think it's the case here, but a lot of time there is more liquidity preference than the deal value so employees can only get what investor want them to pay.

We know how the employees did. Same as ever. They got whatever slop was left in the trough after the big pigs ate their share.

Bitter about VCs? Me? Never.