Twitter employees may have left the office on Friday feeling particularly demoralized. Last month, after another round of layoffs, CEO Elon Musk indicated he would share information about “very significant stock awards and other performance-based compensation” on March 24.
By the end of the working day, the employees had not received such information. “People are not happy, to say the least,” tweeted Platformer journalist Zoe Schiffer, who follows the company closely.
But late last night, Musk apparently sent an email to employees with some of the long-awaited details. Cipher and Wall Street Journal reported that they had received the message.
Wealth reached out to Twitter for comment, but didn’t get an immediate response, at least not from people. (The company no longer has a media communications team.)
In the email, Musk acknowledged Twitter’s radical changes since its $44 billion takeover in October, but said they were necessary because the company was close to running out of cash. According to Cipher. Financial incentives for workers now need to be aligned with the company, which will do periodic liquidity events, he wrote.
Twitter is offering employees new equity grants that will begin vesting in six months, according to Journaland in about a year will offer a liquidity event where they can cash out some of that capital.
The new grants will be awarded over four years, according to Journaland will be separated from the legacy monetized capital when Musk takes over.
Musk made Twitter private after he bought it. In its last full year as a public company, it had more than 7,500 employees and spent nearly $630 million on stock-based compensation, according to Journal. As of December, the company had about 2,000 workers after a round of layoffs after another.
Earlier this week, Musk sent employees a 2:30 a.m. “office optional” email, complaining that the San Francisco office was half-empty. Musk is a fierce critic of telecommuting, suggesting that remote employees are only “pretending to work.”