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
