Twitter CEO gives shares to rally remaining staff
Print Edition
AFTER laying off over 300 workers, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is trying to lift the spirits of the remaining staff by giving them 6.8 million shares of the stock he owns in the online messaging service.
Dorsey is giving up the stock, worth over US$200 million, so Twitter can award the shares to its employees, said documents filed on Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The gesture comes a week after Dorsey laid off 8 percent of Twitter’s workforce in an effort to make the company profitable for the first time in its nine-year history. The gift represents nearly one-third of the stock Dorsey owns in the San Francisco company.
“I’d rather have a smaller part of something big than a bigger part of something small,” Dorsey tweeted about surrendering some of his stock. “I’m confident we can make Twitter big!”
Twitter said Dorsey’s shares will be earmarked for stock issued to employees next year under the company’s incentive plan.
Dorsey will still own 15 million Twitter shares valued at US$460 million, based on Twitter’s current market value.
Twitter’s stock gained US$1.13, or nearly 4 percent, to close Friday at US$30.28.
The shares have declined by 40 percent in the past six months amid concerns about Twitter’s slowing user growth and inability to make money.
Twitter Inc brought back Dorsey, one of its co-founders, as its CEO in hopes that he can figure out a way to make the messaging service more appealing beyond its core audience of about 300 million users. By comparison, Facebook’s social networking service has 1.5 billion users, even though it is only two years older than Twitter.
Dorsey was Twitter’s original CEO, but was ousted because the company’s board didn’t think he was the right leader at that time.
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