Elon Musk says remaining Twitter employees will receive ‘very significant’ stock awards on March 24th
Image: Laura Normand / The Verge
Elon Musk emailed his remaining employees at Twitter on Monday morning to tell them that, after another round of sudden layoffs over the weekend, those who are left will receive “very significant” performance-based stock awards on March 24th, according to an internal memo obtained by The Verge.
“This past week, we completed a difficult organizational overhaul focused on improving future execution, using as much feedback as we could gather from the entire company,” Musk wrote, confirming that he has kept laying employees off after telling them he would stop on November 21st. “Those who remain are highly regarded by those around them.”
The short memo, titled “Performance Awards,” is Musk’s first communication to Twitter employees since he laid off hundreds more of them without warning over the weekend, including several senior leaders and nearly all of the product team. (Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer first tweeted about the memo on Monday.) Employees have been in the dark about exactly how Musk will compensate them for the stock awards they lost after he took Twitter private. In previous emails to them, he has alluded to the system he set up at SpaceX to let employees regularly sell private stock.
Musk has made it hard for even those remaining to know the full scope of his cuts. The company’s internal directory remains offline and Musk shut down the ability for employees to use the company’s Slack last week. He then also disabled Google Chat for work emails, which is still turned off as of press time. Current and former employees I’ve spoken to estimate that Twitter’s total headcount is well below 2,000 now versus the roughly 7,500 employees there when Musk took over.
This story is developing.
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Image: Laura Normand / The Verge
Elon Musk emailed his remaining employees at Twitter on Monday morning to tell them that, after another round of sudden layoffs over the weekend, those who are left will receive “very significant” performance-based stock awards on March 24th, according to an internal memo obtained by The Verge.
“This past week, we completed a difficult organizational overhaul focused on improving future execution, using as much feedback as we could gather from the entire company,” Musk wrote, confirming that he has kept laying employees off after telling them he would stop on November 21st. “Those who remain are highly regarded by those around them.”
The short memo, titled “Performance Awards,” is Musk’s first communication to Twitter employees since he laid off hundreds more of them without warning over the weekend, including several senior leaders and nearly all of the product team. (Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer first tweeted about the memo on Monday.) Employees have been in the dark about exactly how Musk will compensate them for the stock awards they lost after he took Twitter private. In previous emails to them, he has alluded to the system he set up at SpaceX to let employees regularly sell private stock.
Musk has made it hard for even those remaining to know the full scope of his cuts. The company’s internal directory remains offline and Musk shut down the ability for employees to use the company’s Slack last week. He then also disabled Google Chat for work emails, which is still turned off as of press time. Current and former employees I’ve spoken to estimate that Twitter’s total headcount is well below 2,000 now versus the roughly 7,500 employees there when Musk took over.
This story is developing.