Twitter offers new equity grants to staff: WSJ report

According to the report, the company plans to offer a liquidity event roughly a year from now, in which employees can cash out some of their equity. However, the number of employees who received the equity grants and the value of the shares are yet to be ascertained.

Further, the new grants will vest over four years. They will be in addition to and separate from any legacy Twitter equity that was converted to cash during the acquisition last year.

Last month, a report in The Verge, a US-based tech publication, said that Musk emailed his employees – who were not axed — that they will be receiving “very significant” performance-based stock awards on March 24.

Musk’s email followed the microblogging platform firing 200 employees, including Twitter’s head of product Esther Crawford.

“This past week, we completed a difficult organisational overhaul focused on improving future execution, using as much feedback as we could gather from the entire company,” Musk wrote in an internal memo titled Performance Awards. “Those who remain are highly regarded by those around them.”

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This was Musk’s first official communication to his employees since the takeover. However, he had not disclosed the details of the performance-based stock awards. Musk had first mentioned the stock options soon after he took over the company.

“Even though Twitter is now a private company we absolutely will continue to provide stock and options as part of our ongoing compensation plan. The stock plan will be much like that of SpaceX, which has been very successful. As with SpaceX, exceptional amounts of stock will be awarded for exceptional performance,” he had written in an email to Twitter employees in November.

According to regulatory filings, Twitter spent nearly $630 million on stock-based compensation in 2021, the last full year it publicly reported financial results before going private. The company had more than 7,500 full-time employees that year, a number that has drastically fallen after multiple rounds of layoffs.