Twitter employees to receive “very significant” performance-based stock awards: Elon Musk

There may be some good news for Twitter employees even as the staff reels under continued layoffs at the microblogging site since Elon Musk took over the company last year.

According to a report in The Verge, a US-based tech publication, Musk emailed employees – who have not been axed— that they will be receiving “very significant” performance-based stock awards on March 24.

This follows the microblogging platform firing 200 employees over the weekend, including Twitter’s head of product Esther Crawford.


“This past week, we completed a difficult organisational overhaul focused on improving future execution, using as much feedback as we could gather from the entire company,” Musk wrote in an internal memo titled Performance Awards. “Those who remain are highly regarded by those around them.”

This was Musk’s first official communication to his employees since the takeover.

However, he is yet to disclose the details of the performance-based stock awards. Further, it is also unclear how he will execute these awards since Twitter is now a private company, the report said.

Handing pink slips, more changes

NYT reported on Monday that Twitter fired 200 employees over the weekend.

According to the report, the job cuts took place Saturday night and impacted product managers, data scientists, and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability. The NYT report said the team helped keep Twitter's various features online, citing people familiar with the matter.

Earlier US-based tech publication The Information reported that Twitter had fired employees in the eighth such round of job cuts since Musk took over.

The firm eliminated 50 jobs across engineering teams, including those supporting advertising technology, the main Twitter app, and the technical infrastructure to keep its systems up and running, per the report.

Crawford, who was also handed the pink slip, said that her optimism and hard work to build Twitter 2.0 was not a mistake.

“The worst take you could have from watching me go all-in on Twitter 2.0 is that my optimism or hard work was a mistake. Those who jeer & mock are necessarily on the sidelines and not in the arena. I’m deeply proud of the team for building through so much noise & chaos,” the former product head said in a tweet.

Crawford was one of the executives in charge of Twitter Blue, the site’s subscription service. In the days after Musk’s takeover of Twitter, she notably tweeted in a post that went viral that employees sometimes will have to #SleepWhereYouWork to meet deadlines.