After layoffs, Elon Musk announces massive bonuses, stock awards for remaining Twitter staff

Following another round of cuts over the weekend, Twitter CEO Elon Musk notified surviving workers that they will receive "significant" performance-based equity rewards on March 24, reveals a report by The Verge.

"This past week, we finished a difficult organisational overhaul centred on enhancing future execution, using as much input from the full business as we could collect," Musk wrote. "Those who stay are held in high esteem by those who surround them."

Only the "committed" remain

The brief memo, headed "Performance Awards," is Musk's first message to Twitter workers since he abruptly fired hundreds more, including several top loyalists and nearly the entire product team, over the weekend. Platformer's Zo Schiffer was the first to tweet about the document.

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After several rounds of cutbacks and requiring that workers be "extremely committed," Musk hasn't yet revealed specifics about how he will make up for the stock rewards that went away when he took Twitter private. 

Will the payouts be like SpaceX?

In prior internal remarks, he referred to the method he established at SpaceX to allow workers to transfer the company's stock to interested investors on a regular basis. Given Twitter's precarious financial position in comparison to SpaceX, it's uncertain what the short-term appetite for its shares will be.

Meanwhile, Musk has made it challenging for Twitter employees to understand the full extent of his cutbacks. Since he took over, the company's private database has been unavailable. Musk turned off the option for workers to use Slack last week. 

Twitter's financial woes

After deactivating Slack, Musk abruptly stopped Google Chat for work communications, which employees now believe was done to stymie internal contact during the layoffs.

Also read: Twitter sued by the Royal Crown in England over non-payment of rent for their London office

According to current and past employees, Twitter's overall headcount is now well below 2,000, compared to the approximately 7,500 individuals on the payroll when Musk took over. 

"I believe he's just tearing this thing down to the studs and attempting to operate as lean as possible until the market comes around," one recently laid-off employee told Verge.

Twitter's latest round of layoffs

Over 250 workers, distributed across several divisions, were laid off this week. 50 of those included top-level executives and managers. Some of the most prominent and ardent Musk supporters were also sacked in the latest and fourth round of Twitter layoffs. 

Also read: Twitter in freefall: After firing 50 top executives on the weekend, Musk sacks 200 more workers

Among them were Twitter product manager Esther Crawford, who headed the Twitter Blue initiative, and Martijn de Kuijper, the inventor of the now-defunct Revue newsletter platform, which Twitter purchased in 2021.

The most recent round of layoffs comes despite Musk’s pledge not to fire any more employees following his ruthless layoffs in November last year, which impacted two-thirds of the microblogging platform's 7,500 employees.

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