No Slack But Plenty of Stock Awards For Twitter Employees!

The sun will rise, birds will sing and Elon Musk will be in the news. These three things we’re sure of.

According to an internal memo obtained by The Verge, on Monday morning Elon Musk emailed current Twitter employees to inform them that after another round of sudden layoffs, the employees that are retained will receive “very significant” performance-based stock awards on March 24th.

Excerpts of the memo include Elon Musk writing, “This past week, we completed a difficult organizational overhaul focused on improving future execution, using as much feedback as we could gather from the entire company” and, “Those who remain are highly regarded by those around them.”

Titled “Performance Awards”, the memo is the first communication from Elon Musk to Twitter employees since the mass layoffs started. Despite his announcement, he hasn’t shared any details on making the stock awards possible, since he made Twitter private. Although, reportedly, he has referred to his system for SpaceX employees, who can sell company stock to investors.


However, it’s believed that Elon Musk has made it difficult for employees to gauge where his next cut may come from. Reportedly, the company’s internal directory has been offline since he took over. Also recently, Musk turned off the employees’ ability to use the company’s Slack, an internal communications tool, which was claimed to be for “routine maintenance”. This isn’t the case according to a Slack employee who said, “There is no such thing as ‘routine maintenance’. That’s bullshit.”
Regarding the same, responses by some Twitter employees included:
 

• “We didn’t pay our Slack bill. Now everyone is barely working. Penny wise, pound foolish.”
• “Oddly enough, it’s the Slack deactivation that has pushed me to finally start applying to get out.”
• One described the disappearance of Slack as the “proverbial final straw.”
• “After everyone was gone, I had no one to ask questions when stuck. I used to search for the error [messages] on Slack and got help 99 percent of the time.”

As Slack was down for a second day, some employees resorted to emails while others resorted to day offs.


In the last few days, Twitter has seen a few tools go offline, including disabling Google Chat for work emails and Jira, used to track progress, updates and compliance, which went down on the same day as Slack but was restored the next day.

According to some employees, this has been done to disable internal communication during layoffs. They feel the current workforce stands at less than 2000 people, as compared to around 7,500 when Elon Musk took over. Speaking on the matter, one employee said, “I think he’s just tearing this thing down to the studs and trying to run as lean as possible till the market turns around.”

Is there a communication blackout happening at Twitter? Do you think stock awards can turn the morale around at the company? Let us know in the comments below!