Posted January 24, 2023 9:03 am
After laying off half of its employees, Twitter stopped paying rent for its San Francisco headquarters, according to a lawsuit filed by the owner. According to Bloomberg, the company did not pay rent of $3.36 million in December and $3.42 million in January. The headquarters of the social network rises to eight floors and covers an area of more than 42,000 m2 in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the United States.
Ever since billionaire Elon Musk took control of Twitter, he’s been cutting costs. He fired 7,500 people and refused to pay some outstanding bills, such as a $197,725 private jet charter. According to The New York Times, the new owner of Twitter also refused to pay the rent of several of its offices located around the world in order to revise their amounts.
To continue this cost-cutting, Elon Musk has auctioned at least 631 lots of offices, coffee machines, or decorative items such as the blue bird statue symbolizing the social network. The latter sold for $100,000 last week, according to Heritage Global Partners, the company behind the online sale.
accustomed to the courts
The cuts come as the billionaire makes the first payment on a $12.5 billion debt he took on to acquire Twitter. Elon Musk said that the platform is losing more than 4 million a day. While ads make up the bulk of Twitter’s revenue, Tesla’s boss’s unpredictable opinions and decisions have put many advertisers off.
Elon Musk is not the first litigation. Since last week, investors have been accusing him of manipulating the price of Tesla in 2018 through a series of tweets announcing his possible exit from the stock market. The businessman, who has been heard in court as a witness, risks compensating investors in the amount of several billion dollars, but, above all, slightly burdening the actions of Tesla, which have already suffered a real collapse. a year and since then, it has been painfully trying to climb the slope again.
Elon Musk also needs to take care of recruiting his successor at the head of Twitter. Indeed, in a survey released in December, he asked internet users to comment on his continued leadership of the platform, saying he would abide by the decision. “No” won with… 57%.
with agencies