Weeks after being named the company's permanent CEO, Jack Dorsey announced Thursday night that he's giving back a third of the stock he owns in Twitter, to be distributed among the employees. Valued at more than $200 million, the donation represents 1 percent of Twitter's stock.
Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, says he's sending a large chunk of his share in the company "to our employee equity pool to reinvest directly in our people."
🐥⚡️ 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
Explaining the move further, Dorsey tweeted, "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!"
The move comes just over a week after Twitter announced that it's cutting its workforce by 8 percent, laying off up to 336 people. At the time, Dorsey called the decision "tough but necessary" to the company's long-term growth.
In addition to running Twitter, Dorsey is the CEO of Square, the mobile payments and business services company that recently filed papers with the SEC for an initial public offering of its stock.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.