Since buying Twitter at the end of October 2022, Elon Musk has embarked on a crusade to cut the company's expenses.
He has fired more than half of the workforce, ended childcare programs and other benefits or subsidies that the company offered to employees, and closed several international headquarters.
It also seems to have stopped paying the rent on several of its offices.
On December 4, the owner of one of the San Francisco buildings where Twitter is housed
sued Musk for non-payment of rent
.
According to the company that owns the property, located at 650 California Street, Musk owes $130,000, corresponding to the month of November, which has not been paid.
It is a building in the Chinatown neighborhood of San Francisco that Twitter rented for a period of seven years in 2017
as additional space for part of its workers
.
The headquarters, located about a 15-minute walk away at 1355 Market Street, had become too small.
The coronavirus pandemic, however, drastically changed Twitter's space needs, and not just because of temporary lockdown measures.
In 2019,
Jack Dorsey
, the founder and then president of the company,
decided to make the company a 100% remote company
, although he kept the offices open for those workers who needed a physical place to work or meet.
When Musk took control of Twitter, one of his first decisions was to end this policy and force most of the staff back to face-to-face work.
Not all workers have been able to do it.
Many have changed their address during the pandemic, moving to remote areas or other states, taking advantage of Dorsey's work policy.
The consequence is that the offices of Twitter
have not recovered anywhere near the level of activity prior to the pandemic
, and the company has plenty of space to spare.
Layoffs of much of Twitter's staff have also been a major factor in this situation.
Several analysts suggest that Musk, who has recently compared Twitter to a "free-falling plane without controls" and is not ruling out declaring the company bankrupt, could be delaying payments to try to force a renegotiation.
Although the company that owns him has not sued him, the tycoon, who is now the second richest man in the world,
has also not been paying rent for the headquarters on Market Street for months
, nor the maintenance and cleaning staff.
Several workers have recently complained about the bad smells in the offices due to the accumulated garbage and some have even begun to bring their own toilet paper from home.
In addition to not paying rent, Musk has begun selling off some of the furniture and gadgets in these offices in an attempt to raise some money.
The vast majority of economic experts believe that Musk paid too much for the company,
close to 44,000 million dollars
, and has gone into debt to close the operation, both with debt that he has charged to the company itself and personal loans acquired with his Tesla shares. as collateral.
The increase in interest rates and the precipitous fall in the valuation of Tesla (the share has fallen more than 70% in the last year), have complicated the viability of the project.
Also the attitude of Musk himself.
Twitter was making almost $5 billion a year before his arrival, mostly from advertising, but the contentious attitude and new moderation policies Musk has imposed
are driving away major advertisers
.
Musk has increased the number of ads the user sees when checking Twitter and is going to re-allow political propaganda and other types of ads that had been banned during the Dorsey era for promoting polarization and misinformation, but it is not clear that these measures enough to stop the revenue hemorrhage.
The plane, for the moment, continues to fall.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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