Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jack Dorsey gives 1% Twitter stock to employee equity pool

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–37 of 37 posts

Re: Jack Dorsey gives 1% Twitter stock to employee equity pool

#31

Post by mattmanser »

onion2k wrote: post #23
afro88 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Platforms with millions of users never fail quickly. Yes they do. When a better product arrives that gains enough traction, users migrate very quickly. Myspace, Altavista, Aol etc.

Not really. Only AltaVista is dead. MySpace: Still going at https://myspace.com/ Altavista: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista - shut down in 2013, 10 years after it was sold to Yahoo!. AOL: Very much still alive at http://www.aol.com , owns sites like Huffington Post. And in response to mattmanser, ICQ: Still going at https://icq.com/ They may not be the behemoths of the tech industry any more but they are defi…

We are working from a different definition of fail.

Re: Jack Dorsey gives 1% Twitter stock to employee equity pool

#32

Post by rickyc091 »

adventured wrote: post #24
onion2k wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Only AltaVista is dead. MySpace: Still going at https://myspace.com/ Altavista: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista - shut down in 2013, 10 years after it was sold to Yahoo!. AOL: Very much still alive at http://www.aol.com , owns sites like Huffington Post. And in response to mattmanser, ICQ: Still going at https://icq.com/ They may not be the behemoths of the tech industry any more but they are defi…

Your position of never is not correct. Formspring failed extremely fast. http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/15/formspring-the-pioneering-a... It was one of the fastest growing services in Web history, and unraveled just as fast. The existing service was completely shut down. The homepage is now some kind of funnel for another service. And an example that wasn't market based: Megaupload. 180 million users, killed overnight…

I've actually never heard of formspring. I guess the differentiator between formspring and twitter is that twitter is more mainstream. It's popular with celebrities, kids, etc. Formspring seems like a very specific niche market.

Megaupload was killed due to piracy issues. A bit different.

Re: Jack Dorsey gives 1% Twitter stock to employee equity pool

#33

Post by gsibble »

wellsjohnston wrote: post #17
gsibble wrote: post #12

This is simply a tax move. Dorsey is going to pay hundreds of millions in capital gains taxes when Square goes public later this year. He gets to take this as a loss which he can write off against those taxes. It's essentially free. Great PR stunt but doesn't cost him a dime.

He doesn't get to take this as a loss though, he's giving it away. It would be a loss if he invested in Twitter and then sold at a lower price.

Twitter is buying the stock back from him at $0. You can't just donate stock to a company. That stock's nominal value is $200,000,000. So he takes a loss of $200,000,000 which he can write off against any gains he gets from Square's sale.

Re: Jack Dorsey gives 1% Twitter stock to employee equity pool

#34

Post by gsibble »

eis wrote: post #14
gsibble wrote: post #12

This is simply a tax move. Dorsey is going to pay hundreds of millions in capital gains taxes when Square goes public later this year. He gets to take this as a loss which he can write off against those taxes. It's essentially free. Great PR stunt but doesn't cost him a dime.

Now if you could explain how $190 million in losses can save $190 million in taxes, that would be great. Hint: it doesn't work this way.

No, it doesn't. But $190 million in losses can be written off against $190 million in gains.

Re: Jack Dorsey gives 1% Twitter stock to employee equity pool

#35

Post by gsibble »

ViViDboarder wrote: post #30
gsibble wrote: post #12

This is simply a tax move. Dorsey is going to pay hundreds of millions in capital gains taxes when Square goes public later this year. He gets to take this as a loss which he can write off against those taxes. It's essentially free. Great PR stunt but doesn't cost him a dime.

How can you write off gifts? Twitter is not a 401c3. This isn't a donation.

You can give gifts to a corporation. Twitter is buying the stock back at $0.

Re: Jack Dorsey gives 1% Twitter stock to employee equity pool

#36

Post by prawn »

wingerlang wrote: post #11
prawn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubt he's the only one who can see it. It's written up in many stories and most people using Twitter can see how much of a graveyard it can become at times. (It's the social network I use most, so I'd rather that weren't the case.) This could be purely a move about PR and legacy. In recent times we've seen Yahoo and then Microsoft make expensive moves in an attempt to gain relevance. I'm not sure it'd be the rank an…

> .. how much of a graveyard it can become at times Could you expand on this? I don't use Twitter enough to know the subtleties of it.

Can feel like it goes hours with barely anyone seeding it with content, outside a select few people. You can tweet something you feel is really interesting and get no feeling that anyone has seen or appreciated it (my two main accounts have about 800-2000 followers). There are some active topics, but a lot of friends have abandoned it for Instagram. I don't use Facebook so I don't see how active that is by comparison.

My wife works in social media specifically and would go days without a tweet now. I take that as one sign.

Re: Jack Dorsey gives 1% Twitter stock to employee equity pool

#37

Post by corysama »

gsibble wrote: post #33
wellsjohnston wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't get to take this as a loss though, he's giving it away. It would be a loss if he invested in Twitter and then sold at a lower price.

Twitter is buying the stock back from him at $0. You can't just donate stock to a company. That stock's nominal value is $200,000,000. So he takes a loss of $200,000,000 which he can write off against any gains he gets from Square's sale.

Option 1) $200MM loss today, $200MM gain tomorrow, $0 taxes in April. Net result: $0

Option 2) Keep your $200MM today, $200MM gain tomorrow, $70MM taxes in April. Net result: +$130MM

Why would anyone want Option 1?

Post reply on HN