| From: Glenn Petersen | 3/25/2023 7:11:33 PM | | | | | | The company plans to offer a liquidity event roughly a year from now, in which employees can cash out some of their equity, the email shows.
Twitter Offers New Equity Grants to Staff
New stock will start to vest after six months, according to an email
By Alexa Corse
Wall Street Journal
Updated March 25, 2023 12:12 pm ET
Twitter Inc. is offering new equity grants to staff that will start to vest after six months, according to an email sent late Friday that was viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The company plans to offer a liquidity event roughly a year from now, in which employees can cash out some of their equity, the email shows. The number of employees who received the equity grants and the value of the shares couldn’t be learned.
Compensation has been one of many questions facing employees since Elon Musk’s tumultuous acquisition of Twitter last year. Twitter typically offered stock grants, which vested over several years, as part of employees’ compensation, according to former employees. Stock-based compensation has been a popular way to attract talent at many tech companies.
In response to a request for comment, Twitter’s press email responded with a poop emoji, which Mr. Musk recently tweeted will be the company’s auto-response for media inquiries.
The new grants will vest over four years, according to the email, and be in addition to and separate from any legacy Twitter equity that was converted to cash at the time of the acquisition in October 2022.
Twitter spent nearly $630 million on stock-based compensation in 2021, the last full year it publicly reported financial results before going private, according to regulatory filings. The company had more than 7,500 full-time employees that year.
Multiple rounds of layoffs and other departures followed Mr. Musk’s acquisition, and the company hasn’t said exactly how many employees it now has. Mr. Musk said in December the staff was down to roughly 2,000.
When Mr. Musk took Twitter private for $44 billion in October, the company said employees’ stock grants would be converted into the right to receive cash for $54.20 a share, the acquisition price, according to a regulatory filing.
But employees still had questions about how Twitter would handle compensation going forward as a private company.
In February, Mr. Musk told staff in an email that Twitter would make “very significant stock and other compensation awards, based on performance.” Staff would get more information on March 24, he said, according to that email viewed by the Journal.
It wasn’t the first time Mr. Musk mentioned compensation. He previously told staff in November that Twitter would continue to provide stock and said the plan would be similar to what SpaceX offers, according to an email seen by the Journal. “Exceptional amounts of stock will be awarded for exceptional performance,” Mr. Musk added.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the formal name for Mr. Musk’s rocket and satellite company, for years has used company stock to attract and pay employees. Because SpaceX is privately held, staffers who own shares eligible for sale can’t find a buyer for them the way that investors who hold stock in public companies are able to do.
Instead, SpaceX periodically invites current and former employees to sell their shares if they choose, giving them the chance to potentially monetize their holdings. The company sets a total value of shares that can be sold in the offerings, and it isn’t guaranteed that someone who wants to cash out stock will be able to do so or sell all of the shares they want, former employees have said.
“We have been able to give employees liquidity,” Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, said at an industry event in February.
SpaceX’s valuation has risen over the years, allowing employees and former staffers to reap significant gains if they sold. A recent offering looked to value the company at around $140 billion, up almost fivefold from 2018, when SpaceX worked on a funding round designed to value it at $30.5 billion.
Micah Maidenberg contributed to this article.
Write to Alexa Corse at alexa.corse@wsj.com
Twitter Offers New Equity Grants to Staff - WSJ |
| | Twitter, Inc. | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last ReadRead Replies (1) |
|
| To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (2486) | 3/25/2023 8:11:33 PM | | From: kidl | | | | When Mr. Musk took Twitter private for $44 billion in October, the company said employees’ stock grants would be converted into the right to receive cash for $54.20 a share, the acquisition price, according to a regulatory filing.
I bet people will line up to buy $54 shares from employees. |
| | Twitter, Inc. | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| From: kidl | 3/26/2023 8:20:57 AM | | | | | | Elon Musk puts $20 billion value on Twitter, The Information reports
Twitter logo and a photo of Elon Musk are displayed through magnifier in this illustration taken October 27, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
March 25 (Reuters) - Twitter Inc CEO Elon Musk has offered the social-media company's employees stock grants at a valuation of nearly $20 billion, the Information reported on Saturday, citing a person familiar with an email Musk sent to Twitter staff.
The reported valuation is less than half of the $44 billion that Musk paid to acquire the social media platform, pointing to a drop in Twitter's value.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a Reuters' emailed request for a comment.
Musk said in December that Twitter is on track to be "roughly cash flow break-even" in 2023 as top advertisers slashed their spending on the social-media platform after the billionaire' s takeover.
Reporting by Rahat Sandhu in Bengaluru
|
| | Twitter, Inc. | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last ReadRead Replies (1) |
|
| From: Glenn Petersen | 3/26/2023 9:58:11 AM | | | | | | Gettr is a would-be Twitter alternative / competitor.
Indicted Chinese exile controls Gettr social media site, ex-employees say
Guo Wengui, arrested March 15 on fraud charges, was known to have invested, but the extent of his influence on the site has not been previously reported.
By Joseph Menn
The Washington Post
March 26, 2023 at 8:00 a.m. EDT
 Twitter, Inc. | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| From: Ron | 3/26/2023 11:54:41 AM | | | | | | Who's going to help a billionaire pay his bills? Will companies pay $1,000 a month for 'gold badge' verification? Most individuals are not going for the $8 monthly plan
techdirt.com |
| | Twitter, Inc. | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| From: Glenn Petersen | 3/27/2023 4:39:59 AM | | | | | | Twitter blocked 122 accounts in India at the government’s request
Last year, before Elon Musk took over as CEO, Twitter pushed back against such requests from the government.
By SAMRIDDHI SAKUNIA
Rest of the World
24 MARCH 2023 • NEW DELHI, INDIA
Twitter has blocked 122 accounts belonging to journalists, authors, and politicians in India this week in response to legal requests from the Indian government. On March 23, the government issued a request for 29 more Twitter accounts to be blocked, as per data on the Lumen database — a collaborative archive which collects legal complaints and requests for removal of online material. The development follows a police crackdown and a subsequent internet shutdown in the north Indian state of Punjab to arrest separatist figure Amritpal Singh Sandhu. The government has declared Sandhu a fugitive and he is on the run. The current internet and SMS suspension in the state, enforced on March 18, affects 27 million people.
The blocked Twitter accounts include those belonging to journalists Pieter Friedrich, Sandeep Singh, Kamaldeep Singh Brar, and Gagandeep Singh; Canadian politician Jagmeet Singh and poet Rupi Kaur; and pro-Khalistan member of parliament Simranjit Singh Mann. A number of these accounts, which include prominent Sikh voices in the diaspora, were putting out credible information amid the current turmoil in Punjab.
The blocked accounts are currently inaccessible in India, and appear as mostly blank pages with a disclaimer reading “[Username]’s account has been withheld in India in response to a legal demand.” According to Twitter’s policy guidelines, such messaging indicates that “Twitter was compelled to withhold the account specified in response to a valid legal demand, such as a court order.”
The Twitter account for Sandeep Singh, an independent journalist, as seen when accessed from India. @punyaab“
--------------------------------
[Twitter CEO Elon] Musk has been quite categorical [in talking about] ‘free speech’ but laws of the land apply, [and] there is a clear contradiction in the statement,” Prateek Waghre, policy director at digital rights advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation, told Rest of World.
Twitter is the only social media platform to have ever pushed back against similar demands in the past, Waghre noted. “Earlier, it does seem that Twitter did at least push back against some requests [for accounts to be taken down],” he said, adding that there’s no clarity on how many such requests Twitter complied with versus the number it rejected. In June 2022, four months before Musk’s takeover of the company, Twitter had initiated legal action against the Indian government over a series of orders to block content on the platform.
One of the journalists whose account remains inaccessible in India told Rest of World they never received a notification from Twitter informing them of the impending block. “If I tweeted anything that was fake or rumor or hate speech, then the proper case should be registered against me,” they said, requesting anonymity as they didn’t want to publicly comment on an ongoing issue. “Otherwise, the account should be restored with an apology from the government.” All of the journalist’s tweets prior to the block, shared with Rest of World, were news articles or posts on the developments in Punjab.
An independent journalist, requesting anonymity for similar reasons, told Rest of World they received an email from Twitter hours after their account was withheld. The email, viewed by Rest of World, states that Twitter received “a legal removal demand from the Government of India,” and claimed their account “violates India’s Information Technology Act, 2000.” The email further states, “Indian law obligates Twitter to withhold access to this content in India; however, the content remains available elsewhere.”
While blocking accounts in a region isn’t a first for Twitter, the social network would previously issue notices to affected parties. In June 2022, Mohammed Zubair, the founder of Indian fact-checking site Alt News, received an email from Twitter after one of his tweets was flagged by the Delhi Police for violating the Information Technology Act, 2000. However, not only was this tweet not taken down, Twitter’s email read that it “strongly believes in defending and respecting the voice of our users.”
“Some accounts were withheld mid-last year, and reports suggested that Twitter was complying with pending orders … because they were issued with an ultimatum that if they don’t comply with the orders, their chief compliance officer in the country [was liable] for prosecution,” Waghre said.
Twitter’s guidelines indicate that it attempts to notify affected users via their registered email address or through a notification in the app, unless it has been “prohibited” from doing so. The process to overturn a block requires users to respond to Twitter’s email notification — especially in case of a legal demand, such as the one made by the Indian government. But most of the accounts blocked this week never received an email.
Rest of World reached out to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the government’s Department of Legal Affairs for comment, but has yet to receive a response. This story will be updated with responses as and when Rest of World hears from them.
Search for Amritpal Singh prompts Twitter account blocks in India - Rest of World |
| | Twitter, Inc. | Stock Discussion ForumsShare | RecommendKeepReplyMark as Last Read |
|
| |
