According to blind, vesting schedules are converted to cash grants on the same schedule.

So essentially there is still vesting, and no acceleration for regular employees.

Curious to hear if anyone knows otherwise.

https://www.teamblind.com/post/Twitter-Accelerated-Vesting-L...

another reason I think taking twitter private immediately was a wide choice

Yes, according to those I know at twitter this is the case.

Private companies have stocks. They are just on traded on exchange

I think you have a typo.

The technical term is stonks

I blame all typos nowadays on the sorry state of autocorrect on phones. Nine out ten “typos” from me are bad autocorrects that I missed.

Not Twitter. They all got bought on Friday by Elon. There's no way they would have time to create the necessary legal structure by Tuesday to be able to allocate shares and even to give them to employees.

Until recently I worked at a private company with a stock vesting plan.

Completely irrelevant. Twitter just got bought. There are no shares anymore and Twitter hasn't had time to go through the process to create and distribute them.

That’s true. Maybe I misread your comment, but it sounded like you were saying that the reason there cannot be stock grants is because Twitter is private. The reason that there cannot be stock grants is because Elon happens to own all the shares, not because Twitter is private.

The employees are vesting the cashed out value (at $54.20/share) of whatever stock they were vesting as of when the deal closed.

Although SpaceX apparently has vesting stock in a way that keeps the company private. Some of the text messages Elon sent that were published alluded to that.

The company just buys back the shares. It’s essentially a cash bonus.

It’s not mandatory, spacex employees can keep their shares in hope of an eventual IPO

For SpaceX? I knew the company offered to buy back the shares at regular intervals. I am disappointed to learn they are mandatory.

I didn't mean to imply that. I think you can keep the shares.

But there are limits to how many non-insider (e.g. former employees), non-accredited investors a company can have before it is required to go public. For this reason a lot of companies do try to make it mandatory and/or offer sweet deals to buy the shares back upon leaving the company.

> there are limits to how many non-insider (e.g. former employees), non-accredited investors a company can have before it is required to go public.

I thought that limit was some trivial number. I thought the much larger number (2,000 IIRC) was made up of investors who were either insiders or accredited investors.

500. Although I thought the JOBS act increased that number to 2500, but my google-fu is failing me. In any case, once you have that many shareholders on record, you HAVE to go public. This is what forced Google and Facebook to eventually go public.

Companies often get around this by not doing everything possible to prevent an employee from becoming a shareholder on record. E.g. settling option contracts for cash.

This doesn't make sense. There are certainly options and stock to vest; every pre-IPO startup employee in the world knows about the four-year vesting schedule.

It makes total sense. Twitter was just bought on Friday. All existing shares are now owned by Elon. There are no private shares of Twitter yet, and it won't be ready to distribute by Nov 1, which is Tuesday.