Elon Musk’s Twitter has failed to pay $136,000 in rent for one of its offices, the landlord claims in a lawsuit
Elon Musk is trying to keep Twitter spending as close to zero as possible while his personal wealth dwindles — and that apparently includes defaulting on rent payments at the company’s offices.
According to a lawsuit filed last week by the building’s landlord, Twitter owes $136,260 in rent due for its offices on the 30th floor of a downtown San Francisco building.
The landlord at 650 California St., which is not Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, delivered a notice to the social media company Dec. 16, informing it that it would default on payments if it didn’t paid within five days. 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 for the first full year and gradually increased to $128,397 per month 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 $44 billion in October, and the company faces about $1 billion 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 began taking a position at Twitter, he has sold nearly $23 billion worth of stock 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 that’s going to land at high speed with its engines on fire and the controls don’t work,” Musk said Dec. 21.
The company’s headquarters are located at a different address in San Francisco, at 1355 Market St., where Twitter has also reportedly defaulted on rent, according to The New York Times.
In addition to not paying rent and laying off workers, 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. About three-quarters of Twitter’s employees are expected to 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 for around $18,000; bids start at $25), high-end designer furniture such as Eames chairs by Herman Miller and Knoll Diamond chairs that are available in retail are in 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 tech startups failed sold their decadent office supplies.
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