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NewsJack Dorsey, Twitter employees, Twitter shares

Jack Dorsey gives out 1% of Twitter's stake to employees

Oct 23, 2015 09:26 AM EDT

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, announced he would give a third of his stock, equivalent to 1% ownership stake of the company, to his employees.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, said in a couple of tweets he's giving a share of his own stock to employees. "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," Dorsey posted on Twitter.

He explained, "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!"

In addition, newly hired employees could also get larger stock grants, USA Today gives details.

According to a news from the Business Insider, Dorsey has given out around $214M worth of the company's stock in a latest closing price of $29.15 per share.

A week before, Dorsey had also shared back to the Square and Start Small Foundation about 15M shares. Square is a payment service company in which he's also a CEO.

However, Tech Crunch said it appears that this is Dorsey's way to improve the morale of the organization. Previously, Twitter suffered from negative issues with the major transition following the mass layoffs. With the new CEO, employees are apparently looking for an environment that values their work. Acquiring an extra share absolutely helps.

If 1/3 of his shares reflect 1% of the company, he will still have 2% of it. Twitter is worth $19.7B, the report estimated Dorsey probably owns at least 3.64% of the company, which is worth around $394M. Plus, he owns a share of Square that recently went public which is billions of dollars.

On the other hand, Dorsey had just made an apology this week to software developers and had requested to rebuild relationship to them. It seems like Dorsey is looking for ways to elevate its pace of innovation and to invest on top talents as Twitter faces sluggish growth.