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Finance

Twitter Executives Said No Thanks to $35 Million When They Left

Lucinda Shen
By
Lucinda Shen
Lucinda Shen
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Lucinda Shen
By
Lucinda Shen
Lucinda Shen
Down Arrow Button Icon
April 10, 2017, 8:35 AM ET

When two Twitter executives left the ailing company, they also left about $35 million of their pay on the table.

That’s according to a Recode analysis of the company’s 2016 proxy filing. Based on the document, Adam Bain and Adam Messinger — who left their respective positions as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer last year — were paid a respective $910,443 and $484,321 in cash last year.

But the majority of their pay came from stock awards. In 2016, Bain and Messinger were also given the option of taking another $28.4 million and $19.1 million worth of stock awards home, respectively. But they would only have received the full amount of those stock awards in 2019. By leaving in 2016, the two only got about a quarter of the value.

It also means Bain and Messinger were saying no to a respective $7.1 million and $4.8 million in annual stock awards over the next three years. Granted, if Twitter takes a turn for the worse in that time period, those figures could be considerably lower.

About the Author
Lucinda Shen
By Lucinda Shen
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