Twitter Reportedly Stops Paying Rent at San Francisco HQ

Memo to Elon Musk’s debt collectors: are you prepared to send your dunning notices to Mars/?

As his increasingly larger space rockets reliably defy gravity, here on the ground Musk continues to defy business norms on what seems like a regular—and increasingly erratic—basis.

No, we’re not talking about the Chief Twit’s curious decision to reveal his personal political choices at a moment when his pioneering Tesla EVs are facing new and aggressive competition from every other automaker on Earth.

Let’s just say that stepping onto the front lines of America’s bitter culture wars probably won’t have the same impact as Jeep’s never-ending campaign to wrap the American flag around its brand, which continues even though the Pentagon has moved on in its choice of utility vehicles.

Today, we’re focusing on Elon’s new theory of relativity regarding office real estate: the more people I fire, the less rent I have to pay.

In a relentless campaign of layoffs, firings and bizarre challenges to staffers to quit if they won’t commit to his “hardcore” work habits—a move that prompted some of them to project a response on the side of Twitter’s HQ building that called Musk a “mediocre manchild,” among other things—Twitter’s new owner has eliminated more than 50% of the social media giant’s workforce.

The Thomas Edison of the 21^st Century apparently has come up with a novel way—actually there’s nothing new about it—of downsizing Twitter’s office footprint to bring it in line with its incredible shrinking workforce: just stop paying the bills.

According to a report in the NY Times, Twitter has not paid the rent for its San Francisco HQ or other global offices for several weeks as Musk attempts to renegotiate leases, all part of a cost-cutting binge in the wake of his $44B takeover of the chat platform.

Twitter landlords impacted by the company’s failure to pay its rent include Shorenstein, which owns the San Francisco buildings Twitter occupies, Jamestown in Atlanta and Columbia Property Trust in New York.

When Musk took over the company, it had a global office footprint estimated at 1.7M SF. According to the Times, the social media giant now is stiffing vendors as well as landlords.

Musk claims that Twitter has suffered a “massive” drop in revenue due to an exodus of advertisers he says was caused by “activist groups” pressuring them to sever ties with the platform (see culture wars, above).

Musk is trying to raise revenue through a new subscription service, Twitter Blue, that promises to give subscribers priority access to new features, including the ability to edit tweets after they are posted—which probably won’t cut the mustard at the SEC, which still is reviewing Elon’s tweets as they relate to the stock prices of his myriad enterprises, which now include Neuralink, a start-up that is testing a process to implant computer chips into the brains of monkeys.

Last month, the NY Times reported that Musk wants to shut Twitter’s hyperscale data center in California, one of three large data processing facilities used by the company. Twitter leases its data center space from services providers.

The closure of the SMF1 data center in Sacramento—a facility that was involved in a major Twitter service disruption when it overheated during California’s record heat wave in September—will be accompanied by a reduction in the cloud services Twitter uses, as part of a $1B reduction in infrastructure spending that Musk has ordered.

While he’s not paying his rent, Musk apparently has been busy converting Twitter’s San Francisco offices into the mixed-use category by having some his “hardcore” cadre use the offices as bedrooms, which is a violation of the city’s building codes.

No word yet on whether Elon himself is mimicking the nocturnal footprint of Edison—who famously slept on a desk at his NJ lab for as little as four hours each night—and grabbing some shut-eye at the San Francisco HQ after wearing himself out getting booed off the stage at a Dave Chappelle concert in the Bay Area.