This indicates that what you're looking for at the moment is cash, not ownership over assets. This is fine. However, this preference is by no means universal. I imagine that beyond certain amount cash isn't useful anymore and you begin looking for ways to invest it anyway.
Generally, cash loses value due to inflation, but offers high liquidity (you can spend it right away). Many other assets offer capital gains, but are a lot less liquid (you cannot easily sell them, e.g. the options in the blogpost).
I wonder to what degree the preference for cash expressed by the author of the blogpost may be driven by low interest rates (which reduce the appeal of many types of illiquid assets) and low inflation (which increases the appeal of cash) thus tipping the balance of incentives in favor of cash. Probably not the whole story, but may be a factor?
The point made was that options and salary are not fungible. Which is true, they're not. Working for a very constrained kind of investment asset is not the same as working for a salary.
You cannot always invest in what you choose. Generally, illiquid assets are both difficult to sell and difficult to buy. In particular, investing in pre-IPO startups may be hard unless the startup chooses to do crowd-founding, you know the founders or are a venture capitalist.
This indicates that what you're looking for at the moment is cash, not ownership over assets. This is fine. However, this preference is by no means universal. I imagine that beyond certain amount cash isn't useful anymore and you begin looking for ways to invest it anyway.
Generally, cash loses value due to inflation, but offers high liquidity (you can spend it right away). Many other assets offer capital gains, but are a lot less liquid (you cannot easily sell them, e.g. the options in the blogpost).
I wonder to what degree the preference for cash expressed by the author of the blogpost may be driven by low interest rates (which reduce the appeal of many types of illiquid assets) and low inflation (which increases the appeal of cash) thus tipping the balance of incentives in favor of cash. Probably not the whole story, but may be a factor?