Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Continues To Refrain From Salary

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will continue to give up any direct compensation for his services at the social media platform, a company regulatory filing showed Friday. Dorsey has refrained from seeking a salary since he became Twitter’s interim CEO in July last year.

The company also announced a performance-based equity compensation program for Twitter's top executives to link their performance more closely to the company’s fortunes, according to the filing.

Top Twitter executives, including Adam Bain, Vijaya Gadde and Adam Messinger, were granted performance-based stocks by the compensation committee, based up on specific performance targets to be decided on by the board or the committee, the filing said.

Dorsey, who also heads the mobile payments firm Square Inc., had agreed to no salary at Twitter in June until the company's compensation committee agreed upon a package for him, Reuters reported.

Twitter reported its first quarter of no user growth this week — a metric that has been a cause of concern for investors and analysts, even as the company's quarterly performance met expectations.

“We saw a decline in monthly active usage in Q4, but we’ve already seen January monthly actives bounce back to Q3 levels. We’re confident that, with disciplined execution, this growth trend will continue over time,” the company said in a Wednesday filing.

In a bid to boost user growth, Twitter also launched an update to its website that allows users to see personalized tweets first — a stark change from the traditional Twitter experience of seeing real-time, breaking news in reverse chronological order.

The move, however, was not welcomed by Twitter’s power users who took to tweeting #RIPTwitter in protest against the change. Dorsey came out in defense of the revamp, assuring users that the service is “live” and “real time,” and the changes make the Twitter experience even more “Twitter-y.”