No, read what I wrote. YOur first post was incorrect and misleading. You have to pay taxes ont he stock immediatly. Your repost still is confusing. You cannot get out of any taxes, but you can find ways to minimize them. The law states that the first $250k of options granted MAY be qualified, but after that they MUST be NON-quals. It is up tot he company to make their plan qualified or not.
As for the margin loan, if your deep in the money on the option, such as I was on QCOM options, then WHEN YOU EXERCISE, if you have to pay $25 for the option at a time when the stock is $100 a share, then the option price to exercise is $25+.34(100-25), or about 50% of the market value. I always timed my moves such that I waited for a large NUKING from ERICY to exercise and got the lowest market price. You can then borrow 50% on the stock for margin. If you work it out wiht your broker, you can arrange to take margin out when you get the stock (they finance a swing loan if you will) and not have to come up with any money as long as the total is less than 50%. You then hold the stock for another 14 months and it goes to $400 a share and you can now sell off just enough to pay off the margin plus pay off the additional 14% still owed the government. You come out way ahead if you can stand not to sell the stock for a long time. You also sell on capital gains tax rates rahter than income rates at the higher amount. In the end, you would end up with about $90 a share after teh 14 months total cost including margin interest, but you only have to sell every 4th share to pay it off. So you would end up with 3/4 of your shares left over to hold debt free. Note you only have to do the margin swing loan the first time ( or do it in steps over a couple of weeks by doing 100 shares, then 200 shares, then 300 shares, etc as the stock goes up). The second time you would have capital to borrow against for the initial margin loan.
You are correct that the option prior to exercise is not worth anything. However if you have vested options, it is also sometimes a good move to hold those options until the final date possible for exercise (in some cases 10 years) if your intention is to sell the shares when you exercise. It does not make any sense to hold the shares if your going to later hold the stock, as the apprecieation in the price and the tax rate gets into some much larger money very fast. You can see that if I waited until the stock price was $400 a share to exercise, then I would have paid almost 3 times as much for the taxes, which come out at regular imcome rates. by doing the buy and hold routine, I have minimized the taxes for a long term holding stratgy.
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