It’s never reassuring to watch the stock of the company that employs you plummet.
In reaction to rapidly falling stock prices, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner has given his entire $19 million CDN annual stock bonus to his employees, who have been hit hard by the drop.
Whether out of the goodness of his heart or an attempt to boost morale and prevent employees from jumping ship, Weiner made the decision to ask the Compensation Committee to relinquish his annual equity grant and to put those shares back in the pool for LinkedIn employees instead.
His decision comes in the wake of LinkedIn’s less than ideal (i.e. pretty dismal) earnings report last month. The report resulted in a 43 per cent drop in the company’s market value in just one day.
With the competition between high-valued tech companies so fierce, the fear of losing employees is a legitimate one.
Weiner isn’t the first tech CEO to offer employees his own earnings in response to financial struggles. Back in October, CEO Jack Dorsey announced that he would give one third of his stock award to employees after Twitter’s stock plummeted.
But don’t think Weiner’s gesture will put too much of a dent in his wallet: he currently owns $17 million in company stock, with another $77 million in vested options that he can buy for about 2 per cent of LinkedIn’s current stock price.
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