Twitter Sued by San Francisco Landlord Over Failure to Pay Rent

One of Twitter’s landlords in San Francisco is suing the social media platform for failing to pay its rent since Elon Musk bought the company in October.

In a lawsuit filed last week by Columbia Property Trust, the company said Twitter owes $136,200 in rent for its offices in the Hartford Building at 650 California Street.

According to the NY Times, which broke the story early last month that Twitter had stopped paying landlords in San Francisco and its other global offices in an effort by Musk to force them to renegotiate office lease deals, Twitter last week closed its Seattle offices after laying off janitorial and security services at its offices in San Francisco, New York and Seattle.

According to the newspaper, Musk has ordered Twitter employees to delay payments to contractors and vendors as well as landlords, including $200K in charter airplane fees for a surge in flights the week Musk took over the company.

On Christmas Eve, the Times said, Musk ordered the servers at Twitter’s Sacramento data center shut down. Last month, the newspaper reported that Musk was planning to close the Sacramento hyperscale facility—one of three large data processing facilities leased by the company—as part of a $1B reduction of infrastructure spending.

Musk has been on a cost-cutting binge at Twitter since he opted to go through with his $44B takeover of the chat platform as a court began proceedings to decide the matter after Musk had announced—on his Twitter feed, of course—that he was thinking of backing out.

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.

Musk last month initiated a survey of Twitter users on whether he should continue as the company’s CEO, promising to abide by the results. The new Twitter boss lost in a landslide, with 57.5% of those voting deciding he should let someone else run the chat platform.

Musk eventually may be in danger of losing two of his CEO gigs: shareholders at Tesla—which has seen its stock value tumble 65% in 2022, wiping out $700B in market cap and stripping Musk of his status as the world’s richest person—recently filed a lawsuit challenging Musk’s $56B compensation package at the EV carmaker.