Elon Musk is trying to reduce expenses at Twitter to close to zero as his personal wealth shrinks — and that certainly includes cutting rent payments on the company’s offices.
Twitter owes $136,260 in back rent on its 30th-floor offices in downtown San Francisco, according to a lawsuit filed by the building’s owner last week.
The landlord at 650 California St., which is not Twitter’s main headquarters in San Francisco, served the social media company a notice on Dec. 16 saying it would default if it didn’t pay within five days. He has not been paid for five days, according to the lawsuit.
The landlord, Columbia REIT 650 California LLC, is seeking damages in total back rent, as well as attorneys’ fees and other costs. Twitter signed a seven-year lease for the office in 2017. The monthly rent is $107,526.50 in the first full year and increases gradually to $128,397 per month in the seventh year.
Twitter did not respond to a message for comment. The company no longer has a media relations department.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October and the company is on the hook for about $1 billion a year in interest payments from the deal. Much of Musk’s wealth is tied to his ownership of Tesla stock, which has lost more than half of its value since taking ownership of Twitter. He has sold nearly $23 billion in shares of the electric vehicle company to finance the purchase since April, when he began building a position in Twitter. He even lost the top position for the richest people in the world, according to Forbes.
Musk defended his extreme cost-cutting measures last month in a late-night Twitter Spaces call.
“This company is like, Basically, you’re in a plane that’s headed for the ground at high speed with the engine on fire and the controls don’t work,” Musk said on December 21.
The company’s headquarters are at another San Francisco address, 1355 Market St., where Twitter is also reportedly behind on rent, according to The New York Times.
In addition to not paying rent and laying off employees, Musk’s Twitter also auctioned office furniture, kitchen equipment and other items in the past, when Twitter has more than 7,500 full-time workers around the world, and free lunch and other offices. Allowances are common. Some three-quarters of Twitter’s employee base is expected to have left the company, either because they were laid off, fired or quit.
Among the items being auctioned off on Twitter were a pizza oven, a 40-liter commercial kitchen floor mixer (retail around $18,000; bidding starts at $25), high-end designer furniture such as an Eames chair from Herman Miller and a Knoll Diamond chair in the store. thousands.
Even a Twitter bird statue (bids start at $25) and a neon Twitter bird light display (bids start at $50) are available in this fire sale-style auction reminiscent of the dot-com bust of the early 2000s when tech startups failed. they sell decadent office supplies.
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