Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Isn't the Only Exec to Reward Employees
Twitter (TWTR) - Get Report CEO Jack Dorsey is winning praise and admiration for handing one-third of his stock - equivalent to about $200 million or roughly 1% of the company - back to his employees.
Even investors seem to be pleased. Shares of San Francisco-based Twitter were gaining 2.9% to $30 on Friday, trimming its 2015 decline to 16%. Clearly, Twitter will need more than Dorsey's generosity to win over Wall Street.
Dorsey's gifted shares will become part of an employee equity incentive plan that will "[grant] them over time to Twitter's employees and other service providers," according to the SEC filing accompanying the announcement.
In tweets Thursday, Dorsey said he wants to "reinvest directly in our people" and that he'd rather "have a smaller part of something big than a bigger part of something small."
But Dorsey isn't alone among CEOs who handed some of their stock compensation back to the people who work for them. Here's a list of top executives who've made similar moves, and maybe a model for others to do the same:
Dan Price
Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price made headlines earlier this year when he cut his own salary by more than 90% to $70,000 from nearly $1 million in order to provide a boost wages for his lowest paid employees as well to $70,000.
Price cited a "moral imperative" to provide "a normal life" for his workers, drawing praise for his "thought leadership" and even prompting Harvard researchers to make him the subject of a case study. Yet increasing pay for employees, or even executives, doesn't necessarily equate into a company's increased fortunes. Seattle-based Gravity Payments has struggled with a new financial model, prompting slower growth for the the credit card processor.
Haruka Nishimata
Japan Airlines made a remarkable turnaround in the early 2010s from bankruptcy protection to an initial public offering of $8.5 billion.
This may have been due to the actions -- both personal and financial -- of its senior leadership. CEO Kazuo Inamori would gather the full gamut of his employees every three months to read zen-like maxims, like "Be thankful," out of a "turnaround manual." CEO Haruka Nishimata took the bus to work, and lowered his salary to $90,000 during a year of missed profits so that the company could avoid layoffs and pay cuts.
Nevzat Aydin
When Nevzat Aydin sold the Turkish food distributor Yemeksepeti ("food basket" in Turkish) to Berlin, Germany-based Delivery Hero for $589 million, he split $27 million of the proceeds among 114 of the company's longest-working employees, giving them each a $237,000 bonus. The recipients of the bonus were selected for their performance, the length of their employment and their capacity to grow at the company. Yemeksepeti is the Turkish version of GrubHub or Seamless, and also operates in Saudi Arabic, Oman, Jordan, Qatar, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates.
"Yemeksepeti's success story did not happen overnight and many people participated in this journey with their hard work and talent," Aydin said in an interview with CNNMoney.
Simon Wolfson
British aristocrat and fashion executive Simon Wolfson gave his 2013 and 2014 bonuses of $6 million to his employees and announced his intention in April to do the same in 2015. For eligible workers at his Leicestershire, UK-based multinational Next, that translates to a 1.5% salary jump, according to the company.
Despite Wolfson's apparent largesse, the Tory peer, worth more than $171 million, has made comments against living wage campaigns in the U.K., saying that "£6.70-and-hour [or $10.28-an-hour] is enough to live on."












