It's very generous of Jack Dorsey to create an options pool for Twitter employees from his own stock. I've been a CEO, and there were times when I couldn't get the board to do something I wanted, but granting options for employees was never one of them. You want to incentivize them with stock. All shareholders benefit. It doesn't seem right if one of them, even if it's the CEO, has to provide the incentive that all will benefit from.

Further, why employees? Tech companies always do that, but they can get a better deal from independent developers. What if Jack put 1/10th of one percent of his Twitter shares in a pool, and come up with a way to make grants to developers that are parallel to the ones made to employees. Even if the people are equally smart, the developers can act more quickly, and since they don't get salary, they're incentivized to. Nothing like having your livelihood on the line to get your thought process sharp.

All the years I've been an independent developer, I've wondered why no creative tech entrepreneur has even tried to do an incentive deal with developers. It might be too late for Twitter, probably is, but someone should be thinking about this. So much money is sloshing around in the Valley now, creativity with that money might pay off. Something to consider. 

BTW, I put my money behind my ideas this week, and bought 1000 shares of TWTR. What finally got me to move (I had been thinking about it) was Ballmer's support. He's right. They have a valuable asset. Maybe they'll figure out how to make it grow and make lots of money. But I would not mind getting some options too, since I am investing as a developer (I wonder if anyone there has noticed).

PS: Not everyone understands what independent developer means, apparently.