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How much are Twitter executives’ tweets worth to the company?

Since filing its IPO, Twitter revealed how valuable it believes each user account to be. 

 

Joe Kloc

Tech

Posted on Nov 9, 2013   Updated on Jun 1, 2021, 2:17 am CDT

Last week, Twitter became the latest in the long march of 21st-century tech companies to go public for an unimaginable amount of money. And when it did so, it was required to file an Initial Public Offering with the SEC that, as Time pointed out, contained all the necessary information to calculate how much each Twitter account is worth to the company.

Most accounts, as you might guess, aren’t worth all that much. I’m only pulling in $42 dollars a year for the company, a rather fair trade for the service they provide to me.

Some stars, however, are worth quite a bit more: Lady Gaga, for example, is worth about $2.67 million. Katy Perry, meanwhile, pulls in $4.37 million. And Justin Bieber likely tops the list with $20.93 million.

Of course, that the super-rich have valuable Twitter accounts is not a surprise. Nor does it feel particularly necessary that they be compensated for their tweets. But sometimes it’s less clear whether or not Twitter should give a little back to its high-profile microbloggers. For example, Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who worked with Edward Snowden to publish classified details about National Security Agency surveillance, is worth $195,000 to Twitter. That’s not chump change to any journalist.

So what about the people who see all this hard-earned tweet money, the executives at the helm of Twitter? How much are they worth?

Here’s a completely unscientific chart comparing their salaries to the estimated values of their respective Twitter accounts:

 
Executive Salary Twitter Account Profit Salary v. Account Profit
Dick Costolo, CEO $14,000 $105,105 $91,105
Ali Rowghani, COO $250,000 $898 -$249,102
Mike Gupta, CFO $250,000 $50 -$249,950
Adam Bain, President of Global Revenue $250,000 $2,278 -$247,722
Vijaya Gadde, General Counsel $250,000 $48 -$249,952
Chris Fry, Senior Vice President Engineering $250,000 $393 -$249,607

Data via Time, Twitter IPO

What should we make of this chart? Not much, of course: An executive’s worth is presumably not measured in how much money his Twitter account pulls in. Still, the figures are telling. Glenn Greenwald’s tweets about NSA surveillance almost completely cover the salary of any one of the company’s top execs.

Photo by epsos .de/Flickr

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*First Published: Nov 9, 2013, 3:28 pm CST