Jack Dorsey Gives A Third Of His Twitter Stock To Employees

Since he returned to Twitter as permanent CEO, Jack Dorsey has hardly put a foot wrong. He has said the right things, he has unveiled new features and promised to rebuild the relationship between Twitter and developers. 

It has been barely a week since Dorsey announced plans to lay off more than 300 employees from Twitter – that amounts to 8% of their workforce.

The Twitter founder has now revealed that he is giving one third of his stock – 1% of the company – back to the employees. Dorsey has noted that the move is meant to help Twitter continue to grow and that the shares which are worth around $200 million will go into the company equity pool which means there will be more Twitter stock available to employees.

??? I'm giving ~1/3rd of my Twitter stock (exactly 1% of the company) to our employee equity pool to reinvest directly in our people.

— Jack (@jack) October 23, 2015

As for me: I'd rather have a smaller part of something big than a bigger part of something small. I'm confident we can make Twitter big! ??

— Jack (@jack) October 23, 2015

The recent layoffs primarily affect the Twitter engineering department which Dorsey says will benefit from having a smaller team, however the announcement of returning a large number of his shares to employees comes at a crucial time.

Though Dorsey says that he hopes reinvesting in employees will help “make Twitter big,” there will no doubt be a big boost to employee morale following the recent layoff announcement.