Twitter employees to soon receive stock awards: Musk

SAN FRANCISCO : After another round of layoffs over the weekend, Twitter CEO Elon Musk informed the remaining employees that they will receive acevery significant” performance-based stock awards on March 24.

“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 on Monday obtained by The Verge.

“Those who remain are highly regarded by those around them,” he added.

The memo, titled “Performance Awards”, was Musk’s first message to Twitter staff since he fired hundreds more employees over the weekend, including some senior loyalists and almost the whole product team.

However, he hasn’t yet shared any details about “how he will make up for the stock awards that went away when he took Twitter private”, the report said.

He also previously made internal comments in which he mentioned the structure he established at SpaceX to allow employees to regularly sell the company’s stock to interested investors.

Now, the company likely has less than 2,000 employees, which was about 7,500 when Musk took over.

“I think he’s just tearing this thing down to the studs and trying to run as lean as possible till the market turns around,” a recently laid-off employee said.

Recently, more than 50 employees were laid off, which were spread across several departments.

Twitter product manager Esther Crawford, who led the Blue project and Martijn de Kuijper, the creator of the now-shuttered Revue newsletter platform that Twitter acquired in 2021, were among them.

With this recent cut, Musk has done at least four rounds of layoffs.

This is happening despite his promise not to sack more employees after his brutal layoff exercise in November last year that affected two-thirds of the micro-blogging platform’s 7,500 employees.