Twitter CEO “grabbing a lifeboat” by dumping TWTR stock?
Twitter, Inc. CEO Dick Costolo has been making investors nervous as he sells more and more of his stock in the company, and now some have reacted in outrage after his family trust unloaded all of its remaining shares.
“Selling stock speaks louder than any words,” one investor told Business Insider, calling for Costolo to be removed from his position. “As the CEO, how do you look the employees in the eye when you are busy grabbing a lifeboat? He has lost their respect, and obviously the respect of the market. The people who work at Twitter know the potential, and they know he is an obstacle to achieving it. He shouldn’t be running the company anymore.”
The most recent transactions close out the last of a round of sales that began several months ago. Costolo’s trusts earned over $26.6 million after selling half a million shares since July. This contradicts Costolo’s stance earlier in the year when he said that he would not sell any shares when the company lockout period ended in May. His first plans to begin selling shares started only two months later.
While his trusts now hold zero TWTR stock, Twitter spokesperson Jim Prosser pointed out that Costolo still retains a sizable amount of his shares in the company. “Dick has sold shares under a plan filed in the summer and his total sales represent less than 10 percent of his total equity in Twitter,” Prosser wrote.
Although the micro-blogging site is still popular, it has started to fall behind other social media services. Earlier this month, Instagram posted a user base of over 300 million users, pulling ahead of Twitter’s 284 million.
Owing partly to a loss of employee confidence in the company, Twitter also recently fell off Glassdoor.com’s list of the top 50 places to work, where previously it had been number one for tech companies and number two overall.
Twitter’s stock has been in a steady decline, dropping 45 percent in the last year. That fact that Costolo decided to unload his trusts’ shares in a time when their value is dropping could signal a lack of confidence that their value could bounce back.
Since you’re here …
… We’d like to tell you about our mission and how you can help us fulfill it. SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s business model is based on the intrinsic value of the content, not advertising. Unlike many online publications, we don’t have a paywall or run banner advertising, because we want to keep our journalism open, without influence or the need to chase traffic.The journalism, reporting and commentary on SiliconANGLE — along with live, unscripted video from our Silicon Valley studio and globe-trotting video teams at theCUBE — take a lot of hard work, time and money. Keeping the quality high requires the support of sponsors who are aligned with our vision of ad-free journalism content.
If you like the reporting, video interviews and other ad-free content here, please take a moment to check out a sample of the video content supported by our sponsors, tweet your support, and keep coming back to SiliconANGLE.
