Elon Musk is offering stock awards to remaining Twitter employees

Elon Musk claims that remaining Twitter employees will receive'very significant' stock awards soon. He describes the company's most recent round of layoffs as "a difficult organisational overhaul focused on improving future execution" in an internal memo.

According to an internal memo obtained by The Verge, Elon Musk emailed his remaining Twitter employees on Monday morning to inform them that, following another round of unexpected layoffs over the weekend, those who remain will receive "very significant" performance-based stock awards on March 24th.

"This past week, we finished a difficult organisational overhaul focused on improving future execution, using as much feedback from the entire company as we could gather," Musk wrote. "Those who remain are held in high regard by those who surround them."

The brief memo, titled "Performance Awards," is Musk's first communication to Twitter employees since he abruptly fired hundreds more, including several senior loyalists and nearly the entire product team, over the weekend. (Platformer's Zo Schiffer was the first to tweet about the memo.)

After several rounds of cuts and demanding that employees be "extremely hardcore," Musk hasn't yet shared details about how he will make up for the stock awards that went away when he took Twitter private. In previous internal comments, he mentioned the system he put in place at SpaceX to allow employees to sell the company's stock to interested investors on a regular basis. Given Twitter's dire financial situation in comparison to SpaceX, it's unclear what the short-term appetite for its stock will be.

Meanwhile, Musk has made it difficult for Twitter employees to understand the full scope of his cuts. Since he took over, the company's internal directory has been unavailable. Musk turned off the ability for employees to use Slack last week. After deactivating Slack, Musk abruptly disabled Google Chat for work emails, which employees now believe was done to stymie internal communication during the layoffs.

According to current and former employees, Twitter's total headcount is now well below 2,000, compared to the roughly 7,500 people on the payroll when Musk took over. As one recently laid-off employee put it,

"I think he's just tearing this thing down to the studs and trying to run as lean as possible until the market turns around."