Musk cutting Twitter expenses by not paying bills

Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, including “@twitter” sign and clock tower, as pictured from Market Street in November 2022.
Source – osunpokeh, CC SA 4.0.

Elon Musk is trying to slash expenses at Twitter as close to zero as possible while his personal wealth shrinks. This move includes not paying rent for the company’s offices.

Twitter owes $136,260 in overdue rent on its offices on the 30th floor of a building at 650 California Street in downtown San Francisco, according to a lawsuit filed by the building’s landlord last week, according to CTV News Canada. This address is not Twitter’s main headquarters.

The landlord, Columbia REIT 650 California LLC, served a notice to the social media company on Dec. 16 informing it that it would be in default if it didn’t pay within five days. The five days elapsed without payment, according to the lawsuit.

The rental company is seeking damages totaling the back rent, reports ABC News, as well as attorney fees and other expenses. Twitter signed a seven-year lease for the offices in 2017. The monthly rent was $107,526.50 in the first full year and increase gradually to $128,397 per month in the seventh year.

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. Most of Musk’s wealth is tied up in his ownership of Tesla stocks, according to the Associated Press, and those stocks have lost more than half their value since Musk took over ownership of Twitter.

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 is headed towards the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work,” Musk said on Dec. 21.

The company’s headquarters are located at another San Francisco address, 1355 Market St., where Twitter has also reportedly fallen behind on rent, according to The New York Times.

Musk is also auctioning off high-end office furniture, kitchen equipment, and other relics from the past when Twitter had over 7,500 full-time workers around the world.

Some of the items include a pizza oven, a 40-quart commercial kitchen floor mixer (retails for around $18,000; bidding starts at $25), and high-end designer furniture such as Eames chairs from Herman Miller and Knoll Diamond chairs that retail in the thousands.

Even a Twitter bird statue (bidding starts at $25) and a neon Twitter bird light display (bidding starts at $50) are up for grabs.