I feel bad for Twitter employees or potential employees right now.
You KNOW Musk has no intention on converting unvested RSUs to cash. He'll either get rid of them completely while giving everyone a 10% raise (common Twitter TC is 50% cash 50% RSU) or keep everyones cash the same, and tell them their RSUs are now amazing options that will be worth soooo much when Twitter gets relisted in the future
To be fair to Musk he made a lot of people at TSLA very wealthy when everyone in the valley was complaining how poor the TSLA comp packages were vs how hard the worked. I mean I don't think Elon saw TSLA take this much of a rocket ride but employees did pretty damn well on their stock.
If employee compensation is 50% RSUs (which have a public value and can be sold immediately once vested, basically making them as good as salary) then what you're saying is Elon might give everyone a 50% pay-cut.
I guess I can only speak for myself at Google which has a similar high percentage of pay as RSUs, but if they suddenly took away everyone's stock grants, nearly everyone would quit.
Likely also will make deep staff cuts, especially to areas related to content moderation, display algorithms, etc. If this succeeds, I would not be surprised to see a 50% headcount reduction as one of the earliest actions.
He's definitely going to burn a ton of existing employees (basically kick them out), and then incentivize new ones with aggressive packages.
It sucks and I wouldn't wish it on my worse enemy. It does make sense though since the mission and culture will be night and day different and would never mesh.
levels.fyi lets private company employees list their stock option worth as what ever they like, its self reporting
More often these stock options for non-publicly traded companies are not liquid until they IPO. Which a startup engineer at SpaceX completely expects
But the Twitter employees didn't join a startup, and have compared their TC to other liquid comps offered to them. Their leases and mortgages would be based on their liquid comp, which could be cut in half overnight until the next IPO
You KNOW Musk has no intention on converting unvested RSUs to cash. He'll either get rid of them completely while giving everyone a 10% raise (common Twitter TC is 50% cash 50% RSU) or keep everyones cash the same, and tell them their RSUs are now amazing options that will be worth soooo much when Twitter gets relisted in the future