Elon Musk is trying to keep Twitter spending as close as possible while his personal wealth dwindles — and that apparently includes defaulting on rent payments at the company’s offices.
Twitter owes $136,260 (£113,601) in past due rent for its offices on the 30th floor of a downtown San Francisco building, according to a lawsuit filed by the building’s landlord last week.
The landlord of 650 California Street, which is not Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, served a notice to the social media company on Dec. 16, informing it that it would default on payment if it does not pay within of five days pays. According to the lawsuit, the five days passed without payment.
The lessor, Columbia REIT 650 California LLC, is seeking damages equal to the outstanding rent, attorneys’ fees and other costs. Twitter signed a seven-year lease for the offices in 2017. Monthly rent was $107,526.50 (£89,646) for the first full year, gradually increasing to $128,397 (£107,045) for the seventh year.
Twitter didn’t respond to a message for comment. The company no longer has a press department.
Musk bought Twitter for $44bn (£37bn) in October 2022 and the company is on the hook with about $1bn a year in interest payments from the deal. Most of Musk’s wealth is tied to his ownership of Tesla stock, which has lost more than half its value since he took over Twitter. Since April, when he first started taking a position at Twitter, he has sold nearly $23bn (£19bn) of shares in the electric vehicle company to fund the purchase. He even lost the top spot for the richest person in the world, according to Forbes.
Musk defended his extreme cost-cutting moves in a late-night Twitter Spaces call last month.
“This company is basically like you’re on a plane, it’s going to the ground at high speed, the engines are on fire and the controls aren’t working,” Musk said Dec. 21.
The company’s headquarters are located at a different address in San Francisco, at 1355 Market Street, where Twitter has also reportedly defaulted on rent, according to the New York Times.
In addition to not paying rent and firing employees, Musk’s Twitter is also auctioning off high-end office furniture, kitchen appliances, and other relics from the past, when Twitter had over 7,500 full-time employees around the world, and free lunches and other office perks were common. It’s estimated that about three-quarters of Twitter’s employees have left the company, either because they were fired, fired, or terminated.
Among the items Twitter is auctioning off are a pizza oven, a 40-liter commercial kitchen stand mixer (retail around $18,000; bids start at $25), and high-end designer furniture like Eames chairs by Herman Miller and Knoll Diamond chairs retail by the thousands.
There’s even a Twitter bird statue (bids start at $25) and a Twitter bird neon light (bids start at $50) up for grabs in this fire-sale-style auction that’s reminiscent of the early 2000s dot-com bust , when failed tech startups were sold off their decadent office supplies.