Twitter CEO Elon Musk has announced that the remaining employees of the company will receive “very significant” performance-based stock awards on March 24. Musk shared this news in an internal memo titled “Performance Awards” on Monday, which is his first message to the Twitter staff since laying off hundreds of employees over the weekend. He highlighted the difficult organizational overhaul that Twitter has gone through and stated that the remaining employees are highly regarded by their peers.
However, Musk has not shared any details on how he will make up for the stock awards that were lost when he took Twitter private. The report also mentioned Musk’s previous comments about the structure he established at SpaceX, which allows employees to sell the company’s stock to interested investors regularly.
Twitter likely has less than 2,000 employees now, compared to about 7,500 when Musk took over. The recent layoffs have affected over 50 employees across several departments, including product manager Esther Crawford and the creator of the now-shuttered Revue newsletter platform, Martijn de Kuijper.
Despite Musk’s promise not to lay off more employees after the brutal exercise in November 2021, this recent cut marks at least the fourth round of layoffs under his leadership. Some speculate that he may be trying to run the company as lean as possible until the market turns around.
