Apart from the tax office suing you in oblivion because the startup you’ve founded is now worth 10x its revenue, so you need to pay 40% CGT with only 1/10th the income (at least that’s the French exit tax).
So basically once you are rich, you have to choose to leave most of it on the table to go to a poor country.
If you have an early startup valued based on vibes, and they tax you on those vibes (do they... source...?) then you are not rich. A xoogler who saved 500k post tax is arguably richer in that scenario.
All companies are worth more than their revenue. It’s not vibes, it’s just how it works.
Same goes for employees with stock options in USA: They get taxed on CGT every year until they sell, for money they don’t have yet.
Same goes for development costs: A change in the US tax code circe 2016 made that development costs were assumed to be an investment over 3 years, so if you have 1m$ sales and 1m$ costs in the first year, the IRS only counts 333k$ real costs and you own them tax on the 666k$ revenue.
It’s a classic problem in capital. So yes, a 300k€ revenue means you are valued at a multiple of that and owe tax.
I think exercising an option may be an event that realizes gains and causes issues for someone who has to pay tax but can't sell the asset as it is not liquid. But I think that isn't what you are taking about?
As for revenue. Many companies are priced at X revenue, but those are companies you expect to grow. If a company raises $1m and sells AI tokens for $1m/y (the revenue) in order to "dominate the market" but they pay AWS $2m/y for, and they can't raise any more or increase prices then that startup is probably worth nothing. For example.
Another example is a bar that sells $1m in revenue drinks and food, makes 500k gross and 50k net after staff, rent taxes etc.
So basically once you are rich, you have to choose to leave most of it on the table to go to a poor country.