Elon Musk gives Twitter employees details on ‘very significant’ stock awards after relentless layoffs, cost-cutting: Report
Twitter employees might have left the office Friday feeling particularly demoralized. Last month, after yet another round of layoffs, CEO Elon Musk indicated he’d share information about “very significant stock and other compensation awards, based on performance” on March 24.
Employees received no such information by the end of the workday. “People are not happy, to say the least,” tweeted Platformer journalist Zoë Schiffer, who tracks the company closely.
But late last night, Musk apparently sent an email to employees with some of the much-anticipated details. Schiffer and the Wall Street Journal reported they obtained the message.
Fortune reached out to Twitter for comments but received no immediate reply, at least not from any humans. (The company no longer has a media communications team.)
In the email, Musk acknowledged the radical changes at Twitter since his $44 billion takeover in October, but said they were needed because the company had been close to running out of money, according to Schiffer. Now, financial incentives for workers should align with the company, which will do periodic liquidity events, he reportedly wrote.
Twitter is offering employees new equity grants that will start to vest after six months, according to the Journal, and in about a year it will offer a liquidity event in which they can cash out some of that equity.
The new grants will vest over four years, according to the Journal, and will be separate from legacy equity converted to cash when Musk took over.
Musk took Twitter private after buying it. In its last full year as a public firm, it had more than 7,500 employees and spent nearly $630 million on stock-based compensation, according to the Journal. As of December, the company had about 2,000 workers, following one round of layoffs after another and drastic cost-cutting measures.
Earlier this week, Musk sent employees an email at 2:30 a.m. saying the “office is not optional,” complaining about the San Francisco office being half empty. Musk has been a fierce critic of remote work, suggesting remote employees only “pretend to work.”