What happens with stock grants for Twitter employees?
Did they cut comp in half? Vested stock will (I assume) be paid at $54.20, but for forward looking grants pending vest?
"At the meeting with employees on Monday, executives tried to assure employees that they wouldn’t be shortchanged by Mr. Musk’s acquisition. Mr. Agrawal told employees that their stock options would convert to cash when the deal with Mr. Musk closes, which he estimated would take between three and six months. Employees would receive their same benefits packages for a year after the deal was finalized and there were no immediate plans for layoffs, he added."
Depends on the deal, I’ve been a part of a deal where unvested stock converted as if it had vested: depending on how much is outstanding, and the value of the ongoing relationship between the company and employees, you could expect all outstanding options (vested, unvested) to be paid.
That said, in this situation, it’s unclear how Musk will behave: on the one hand, to ensure a smooth transition, it makes sense to maximise the chance that employees stay on — even if he intends to cut them eventually — but also this is Musk and so maybe he’ll see people who won’t be loyal to him self selecting to leave as a bonus and he’ll make it as easy for them as possible (by behaving in the least good way) even if it hurts the company.
Depends on the buyer and nuanced details of how the awards actually work at Twitter. For existing shares vested those will most likely just be paid out in cash into a brokerage account for any shares still held. If the acquisition is a traditional pure cash transaction employees would cease to be shareholders.
On things not vested it’s typically up to the buyer. Obviously some incentive to not just annoy everyone to the point that they all quit, but the new buyer will generally quickly decide who they want to keep and won’t be too fussed if others just get pissed and leave. Reality is in transactions like this the employees are just another company asset for the new owner to sort out what to do with.
Most agreements have a liquidity event (i.e. an acquisition) clause. They this sort of thing happens, your unvested options can be vested and exercised immediately.
They will be paid out on the same schedule, but as cash (at $54.20). I assume this will also be true of promised grants with a number attached to them that have not yet been converted to a fixed number of shares yet, but that hasn't been fully clarified yet.
I don't know why any sane twitter employee would stay on.
Twitter employees have spent years being mocked as useless idiots that can't ship code and are destroying society with "Wokeness". Now they don't have any financial upside to look forward to either.
I follow a bunch of Tesla/Spacex accounts on Twitter and you can plainly see that any dissent from Musks wishes will be punished with online mobs and harassment. Currently they're all laughing at how massive they layoffs will be. I don't know why anyone would subject themselves to this.
It is likely they will try to maintain the total comp levels for at least a year, meanwhile they will reassess the entire talent pool and make whatever correction they deem necessary. Twitter has no meaningful assets other than the talented people that work there. If sufficient number of critical talent leave (intentionally or accidentally), it could hurt twitter significantly in the near term. People from other industries sometimes don't get this – in a live internet app service, software code has very short shelf life. It starts to rot/smell very quickly if there aren't engineers who understand it tending to it. Without engineers who understand the codebase well, it usually results in more frequent outages in production, super slow productivity in adding features, and any feature change resulting in buggy/broken functionality etc. Bringing in new engineers who can dig out a working understanding of the code, then refactor/rewrite the whole thing can be done - but it requires talent that is very scarce and even then it is super slow – likely multiple quarters to couple of years – for any such transition.
Also: what is the point of taking the company private?
really depends on the buyer.. would have to hear what employees say. Might be a lot of posts on blind about it
Since they haven't vested then they're lost, unless the buyer is very generous.
Obviously most of the employees who oppose this deal will refuse the grants.