Jack Dorsey gives Twitter employees $200 million in stock

Over 336 employees, inclusive of high-level people were laid off in order to streamline Twitter‘s product portfolio. If it was distributed evenly, it would work out to almost $50,000 worth of stock for each staff member.

Dorsey has agreed to give one-third of his Twitter stock – about 7 million shares – back to the company for employee bonus pools.

Co-founder turned Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has given a third of his stake in the company back to employees.

Returning hundreds of millions of dollars in stock to employees is not something that’s often done lightly – and if the company proves to be undervalued, like Steve Ballmer implies, there’s a ton of upside that Dorsey is offering to his employees.

Dorsey has taken a few big steps in the two weeks that he has been CEO of the Twitter. In the United Kingdom alone, Facebook has nearly 3.5 times more active users than Twitter and made an estimated £223m past year. That’s not far-fetched, even though Twitter has been struggling to show growth these days. Dorsey’s decision to redistribute and refocus on stocks for employees, however, might be the start of a new, tech company-fueled market trend.

And this investment-essentially a double-down on Twitter’s future-could easily turn a big profit for Dorsey. Since his appointment as full-time CEO earlier this month, Dorsey, who also heads the mobile payments startup Square, has had his hands full. He now owns 24 percent of the company and is its largest shareholder.

Just last week, Dorsey announced he would give 40 million shares of his other company, Square, to a new foundation that invests in under-served parts of the world.

Dorsey announced the news on Twitter, as well as at the company’s “Teatime” town hall event.