No, for taxes, married filing separately is a different category than single. Married filing separately results in a higher tax bill than married filing jointly for most couples.
My previous employer had a tender offer as part of a new funding round.
I was an ex-employee already and had exercised my options within the 90 day window of resigning. If I remember correctly, we used Carta for both exercising the options and the tender offer.
For the tender offer, the company set a deadline and a price per share. Current employees were limited to selling a certain % of their options/shares. The website enforced the same restriction for me, which seemed like a bug, but I didn’t plan on selling most of my shares anyway. I chose a number of shares in a web form, clicked a button, and got cash direct-deposited. I had a larger than usual tax bill but I paid it while handling my usual annual tax return. No penalty on the taxes due to the “safe harbor” rule.
(1) In the final two years of secondary school (16/17 to 18) you choose a set of 3 or 4 subjects to study for A levels. This is usually done with a specific course at university in mind. For example, someone aiming for Chemistry might study Maths, Chemistry, and Physics. Some people also add Further Maths (if they're aiming for Maths at a top university, this adds things like group theory, differential equations) or a language (e.g. if you already know French, it's not all that difficult to do French A-level too).
(2) Before your final exams, you apply to universities and they have some process for giving you an offer. This process isn't standardised. Some universities have pre-interview exams (e.g. Oxford), some have extra exams you take alongside your A-level exams (e.g. to do Maths at Cambridge, you have to take STEP exams which are...super hard). My interview process for Maths at Oxford was pretty stressful, I had seven interviews, all very technical, at various colleges. Some I no doubt bombed, some I did okay in. I also had a phone interview with the college that ended up getting me.
(3) You get some offer, either conditional (get these grades and we'll let you in) or unconditional (you got in, grades don't matter). My offer was to just get all top grades so I really had to grind studying and was super stressed on results day.
(4) You pick two unis to go with. Usually one primary and one backup.
(5) You do your exams, then get results. If you met your offer, great! If not, you go into clearing where you can maybe go into a "leftover" place at some uni somewhere.
(6) You go to uni and study something. You got a place on a Maths course, you study Maths. I'm mentioning this because it works differently in the US.
There are pros and cons to this process. Specialising early means the baseline for a Maths course at uni is higher than in the US. But because you're asking 15 year olds to decide what they want to study for the next 5-6 years, lots of people probably pick the wrong thing. And if you're not good at Maths and don't study Maths at A-level, you're just locked out of anything STEM e.g. Chemistry, Physics, Maths, Computer Science, all require a Maths A-level. So you get a lot of kids making poor decisions they later regret and can't reverse.
Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimi_Heselden