Twitter spends a lot of time telling Wall Street that it is going to improve its product and expand its user base.
Twitter says it won’t reprice stock options to help keep employees — but Jack Dorsey still wants to give them $100 million of his shares
Wall Street likes it.
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
Today, Twitter had a different message for Wall Street: We’re not going hand out new, cheap stock options. Unless you let us.
And unlike other messaging Twitter has sent to Wall Street, this one seemed to work! Twitter shares are up 2 percent today.
The details: Twitter told investors, via a proxy filing this morning, that it wants to “prohibit the repricing of stock options” without approval from shareholders. That is: It won’t tell Twitter employees whose options allow them to buy shares for, say, $30 that they can now buy them for $14.40 — Twitter’s current price.
That’s the kind of move the tech industry used to use a lot of in the old days, so that companies could try to hang on to employees even as the value of their shares declined.
Then, the strategy became unpopular. And a Twitter rep says the company hasn’t been re-pricing options, anyway — today’s statement just formalizes the practice.
But Twitter does have other tools to boost the morale of workers whose stock has become much less valuable. The company has been handing out more restricted stock units, as well as cash, to employees — and Twitter doesn’t have any plans to change that practice.
And CEO Jack Dorsey has said he still wants to donate 6.8 million shares of his own Twitter stock — that’s worth about $100 million at today’s prices — to employees. In order to do that, he’ll need the go-ahead from Twitter shareholders at their annual meeting next week.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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