Pixar Options Draw Scrutiny

And that wasn't the only time that Lasseter received some nicely priced shares, according to the report. Pixar gave him 250,000 split-adjusted options in February 1997. The options carried a strike price equivalent to the market price of the stock on the last business day before the company announced a new five-year production agreement with Disney.

Lasseter's options were priced at a split-adjusted $7.06 a share. Immediately after the announcement of the Disney deal, Pixar's stock rocketed up to more than $10.50 a share, according to Bloomberg.

Pixar didn't disclose that Lasseter options grant until more than a month after the fact, according to Bloomberg.

As part of Disney's acquisition of Pixar, Lasseter recently traded in 1.12 million Pixar options for 2.58 million options to buy Disney's stock.

In both 1997 and 1998, Pixar awarded McArthur 400,000 split-adjusted options. Those options carried split-adjusted strike prices of $6.38 a share in 1997 and $10.69 a share in 1998. Those prices were equivalent to the lowest price for Pixar's stock in those two years, according to Bloomberg.

Pixar is only the latest company whose past stock options grants have come under scrutiny. The Securities and Exchange Commission has announced that it is investigating more than 80 companies for options improprieties, and many more companies are doing their own internal probes or have been sued by shareholders over their grants.

To date, federal regulators have largely focused on the practice of options backdating.

Employee stock options typically grant insiders the right to buy their company's stock at a price equal to the market price of the stock on the day the options are granted. But with backdated options, companies are alleged to have assigned to the options a strike price equal to the market price on a date days or weeks before the grant date, which was known at the time of the grant to be a short-term low in the company's stock.