Rumor: ByteDance opens cash-for-Doubao share swap; shares jump 30% in four months.

Beating AI Express (Dongcha) – According to the latest internal news, ByteDance recently held a briefing on Doubao shares, raising the price from $14.85 in June to $17.02, a 14.6% increase over two months. Meanwhile, some employees can adjust their compensation structure by converting a portion of their total cash package into Doubao shares, with conversion limits varying by individual. The report notes that some L2 and L3 employees have a maximum allocation ratio of 20%, while some L3 and L4 employees can reach 25% or 30%. ByteDance also increased Doubao share grants, with some employees receiving additional allocations of around 5% of their total compensation package. This policy does not cover all staff, applying mainly to teams working on Seed’s pre-training, multimodal, Vision Language Model (VLM) and other large models, as well as the main Doubao App under Flow. Some teams closely tied to Seed and the Doubao base, such as Ark, may also receive Doubao shares. Doubao shares are an internal virtual equity incentive designed by ByteDance for its AI business. The first repurchase price was $13.08 in April, rising to $14.85 in June. In May, some Seed employees were already given the option to convert their year-end bonuses into Doubao shares. With the further opening of total cash package conversion this time, employees can allocate more of their income directly to the Doubao business. Calculated from the April price of $13.08, Doubao shares have risen by 30.1% cumulatively so far. In the same period from April to June, Doubao shares increased by 13.5%, while ByteDance Group options only rose by around 2.6%.