Elon Musk cuts off free meals for Twitter employees, arguing no one is in the office to eat them
Just as Elon Musk was ordering Twitter employees to return to the office, he plans to scrap their costly free lunch perks — arguing that employees didn’t show up for lunch at all.
The reasoning may seem counterintuitive now that he has ended the remote work privilege introduced by Jack Dorsey in October 2020, but it is emblematic of the company’s acute financial woes.
Twitter loses over 4 million dollars every day by Musk’s count, and it faces an additional $1 billion in interest payments to cover the $13 billion in debt Musk has piled on the company as part of the deal.
Spending cuts have been a contentious issue on Twitter, with some viewing Musk’s cuts as a draconian attempt to recoup money from his overpaid investments, while others have little sympathy, given that removing perks is, of course, one of the first levers to pull must, if one fundamentally restructures a company, the red.
According to Musk, Twitter is estimated to spend over $400 per lunch served, or about $13 million per year, for its San Francisco headquarters.
Part of the reason for the high cost per meal is the extremely low presence in the office. Utilization on an average day was less than 10%.
However, Twitter’s vice president of real estate, Tracy Hawkins, disagreed with his calculation, saying that attendance was much higher — anywhere from 20% to 50% at the offices.
“That’s a lie,” Hawkins posted, saying she’d rather quit than work for Musk. “We spent $20 to $25 per person per day on breakfast and lunch. This allowed employees to work through lunch breaks and meetings.”
Musk’s bumpy ride so far
It wasn’t the only time a Twitter employee called out Musk. On Sunday, he also apologized to Twitter users abroad for the slow performance, blaming the infrastructure.
But Sasha Solomon, the technical lead on Twitter, questioned whether he actually understood the programming language.
“They didn’t just dismiss almost all of the infra and then make a cheeky comment,” she wrote. “Have you even bothered to learn how GraphQL works?”
Musk’s tenure as owner of Twitter has been brief, but it has already created more drama than the social media platform has in years.
Hate speech surged amid a loss in content moderation, scammer accounts proliferated like weeds, companies ripped off their advertisements and employees were laid off in a chaotic mass cull.
Rather than calming nerves, the “boss jerk” has helped ignite them himself, using his platform to attack critics and opponents alike, and at one point warned he was unleashing a “thermonuclear name and disgrace” on corporations , who succumbed to what he blew up pressure activists and pulled their ads.
To make matters worse, Twitter’s top compliance officers resigned as Musk allegedly risks billions in fines for failing to comply with a consent decree reached with the Federal Trade Commission in May.
That reputation damage alone It has led some people to speculate that he hopes to write off the $44 billion as a gigantic reservoir of personal tax losses to offset gains from Tesla stock sales in the future.
“The only consolation is tax losses. Once their shares are found to be worthless, they are entitled to capital loss deductions equal to their basis in the shares,” accounting expert Robert Willens told Barron’s.
Musk, meanwhile, is undeterred with his plan to give Twitter employees another key advantage to stave off the threat of bankruptcy.
“There are more people preparing breakfast than eating breakfast,” he posted on Sunday.
It’s safe to say that once employees are forced to return to the office, that will no longer be the case.
Sign up for the Fortune Features Email list so you don’t miss our biggest features, exclusive interviews and investigations.
