Twitter is one of the most popular social networking services and one responsible for early online news. In this network, users can share, communicate, comment, and post to other users which are more commonly referred to as “tweet.” The catch here is to compress your thoughts because you can only input a total of 140 characters per tweet.
However, what made one of the creators of this struggling social media company made a decision to steadily sell off his shares in the company?
Twitter’s cofounder and board member, Evan Williams, (TWTR, Tech30), is planning to gradually sell off as much as 30% of his shares in the microblogging service over the next year.
According to reports, Williams’ motivation for selling his stakes is to use the earnings to fuel his investments in other business startups to help build a smarter and more sustainable world. Another reason is that he wants to continue his philanthropic donations.
Williams wrote a short post on Medium, a blogging site he started after leaving Twitter, last Thursday in order to justify his decision and get in front of any negative speculations, “It actually pains me to be selling at this point, but this sale is all about personal context, not company context”.
He also added that the huge majority of his assets are Twitter shares. He is optimistic about the future of the company and its recent changes are a big challenge.
Twitter’s stock price is drifting near its all-time low as the company struggles to reignite user growth and reverse ad sales declines. The stock dipped by more than 1% in midday trading on Thursday after Williams’ announcement to sell his shares.
According to company filing, Williams sold more than $4 million worth of shares this week. He anticipates putting up for sale a “minority” of his shares next year.
“The plan is not expected to result in the sale of more than 30% of Ev’s holdings,” a spokesperson for Twitter assumed in a statement provided to CNNTech.
Williams momentarily served as Twitter CEO when he helped Twitter launched in 2006. After leaving, he went on to launch his publishing form, Medium.
The founders of the company often have a disproportionate percentage of their net worth tied up in company stock but most of the time they are happy to maintain those positions and work on growing the value of of the companies they started. Williams was ousted from the daily operations years ago with fellow co-founder Jack Dorsey.
Chris Sacca, an early investor and evangelist for the platform, is another large Twitter shareholder offloading his stock. He ditched the stock after the company brought back cofounder Jack Dorsey as CEO in 2015 instead of Williams.
He tweeted last month, “When they failed to get Ev involved again, I lost hope. Love the service, hate the stock”.
For his part, Williams stressed his optimism for Twitter and praised its recent hires and attempts to crack down on h********t. “I’m proud to be on the board and optimistic about the future of the company,” Williams wrote.
Twitter may still have many challenges ahead of it, whatever it may be, they have to keep moving.
These types of withdrawals are signs that a company might be on the verge of destruction but on the lighter note, Twitter is still booming and a majority of our population is in it. Is Twitter failing? Is it already out of the hype?
