According to an internal document acquired by The Verge, Elon Musk emailed his surviving Twitter employees on Monday morning to inform them that, following another round of unexpected layoffs over the weekend, those who are left will receive "quite big" performance-based stock awards on March 24.
This past week, incorporating as much input as possible from the entire company, "we accomplished a challenging organizational makeover focused on better future execution," Musk wrote. "Those around them hold those who remain highly regarded
The brief memo, headlined "Performance Awards," is Musk's first message to Twitter staff members since he fired hundreds more people over the weekend, including some top loyalists and practically the entire product team. (Zo Schiffer of Platformer tweeted about the document initially.)
In the meantime, Musk has made it challenging for Twitter employees to understand the entire magnitude of his downsizing. Since he took charge, the company's internal directory has been unavailable. Last week, Musk disabled access to the company's Slack for staff. Employees now believe that Musk deactivated Google Chat for business emails without warning after shutting down Slack in order to prevent internal communication during the layoffs.
According to current and former workers I've spoken to, Twitter has a total staff far below 2,000, down from the 7,500 individuals employed there before Musk took over. I think he's basically taking this thing down to the studs and attempting to run as lean as possible until the market swings around, as one recently laid-off employee, informed me.