Jeff Weiner Just Gave Every LinkedIn Employee An iPad Mini

Darain Faraz, a communications manager at LinkedIn in the UK, just tweeted that CEO Jeff Weiner just gave an iPad Mini to every one of LinkedIn's 3,500 employees.

A spokesperson confirmed the gift:

We wanted to acknowledge the hard work and accomplishments of all of our employees in 2012. During today’s biweekly All Hands meeting, we surprised our employees with iPad Minis as a small gesture of the company’s gratitude for their contributions.

Weiner didn't cheap out, either—one employee tells us they got the $429, 32-gigabyte model, not the less-expensive $329 model. At retail prices, that would cost around $1.5 million.

LinkedIn just reported a monster quarter where its revenues beat expectations by $25 million. So that's a pretty nice way to share the windfall with employees.

It may be coincidence, but we have a pretty good idea of where Weiner might have gotten the idea: When he was a top executive at Yahoo, Weiner worked with Brad Garlinghouse. Garlinghouse is now CEO of YouSendIt, an enterprise file-sharing company, and he gave all of his employees iPad Minis over the holidays.

Here's Faraz's tweet.

That awesome moment when your CEO dishes out iPad minis to EVERY employee @linkedin @jeffweiner

— Darain Faraz (@darainfaraz) February 13, 2013