Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey hands out shares to remaining staffers

Having recently put down his axe after hacking away 336 staff earlier this month, chief executive Jack Dorsey has now donned his Santa suit to hand out $200m (£130m) worth of stock to remaining employees. Dorsey said he was giving away about 1 per cent of the company to the company’s 3,700 employees, in Twitter's Teatime town …

[Your alien overlord - fear me]

Kick 8% of your employees out then to rub their faces in it, give the remaining staff stock options. OK, it's Twitter stock options but still a kick in nuts.I wonder which management course he took?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the one that included modules on making a profit...Staff costs for twitter must be pretty high on their lists of costs...

[joed]

I'd wonder about the possibility of a lawsuit. It's no different than divorce and separated parties have equal claims to common assets made during the relationship (whatever they were for Twitter).

[Anonymous Coward]

Parting from your employer is not the same as parting from your spouse. Your employer has not promised to share everything with you until parted by death, for one thing, and is a whole lot less interested in what you do in the evenings.

[Trevor_Pott]

Exactly. In no universe do you need 4000 employees to run fucking Twitter. Even the 8% cut is not enough. Not by far. Twitter is massively, massively overstaffed and horrifically badly managed. Man, the things I could do with that company were I in charge...

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

"worth" of stock

I'd like to have my share paid out in cash, please... in mercury dimes, if possible...

[MyffyW]

1% of the company? One shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth but my 1/3700th of that wouldn't act as a massive motivation. Whilst wondering where the axe might next fall would probably get me blowing the dust off my CV.

[Trevor_Pott]

The 1% is being split up amongst the employees directly. It is going to an employee fund. (Pension? Something else? I can't recall.) That fund will then leverage the shares as part of its portfolio in order to continue growing cash reserves for whatever it is that employee fund's purpose is.

Now, this only matters if either

A) Twitter pays dividends (direct cash injection into the employee fund)

B) Twitter's stock ameliorates (growing the value for the employee fund) and it can then sell some shares to realize that value or

C) The employee fund can borrow against the theoretical value of the shares and then it can reinvest that money into something that actually does pay out, and does so at a rate greater than the repayment costs of the loan.

Finance!

[Anonymous Coward]

On which planet would 1% of Twitter be worth 130mil?

Presumably the one that needs a strong twitter?

This guy is a living legend, they'll be making films about him in years to come.

[SolidSquid]

Question is whether the staff members are able to liquidate those shares or are stuck with them as a way to manipulate them into doing more overtime work in a desperate attempt to make the company profitable

[MAH]

it could also be a smart play to ensure the peon's don't unionize. In Canada, if you have ownership in the company you cannot form a union (WestJet staff are "owners" for this very reason).

Could be that owning a particular type of stock in the company also makes you ineligible to form a union

[Christian Berger]

What do all those people do?

I mean seriously you'd expect a service like Twitter to be run by, at most, a dozen people, probably _much_ less. It seems to be far more feasible to just get rid of the idea of selling ads in tweets and just sell normal ads or even go completely donation based.

[Trevor_Pott]

Re: What do all those people do?

I did the maths once and came up with a need for about 250 people to run Twitter, with a "I could find work for" up to 1000. More than 1000, however, is just nuts.