It’s bad enough that Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters ran out of toilet paper. Now its office workers have been squeezed from six floors to two.
The social media platform now owned and operated by billionaire Elon Musk has downsized its headquarters by two-thirds at 1355 Market Street, the San Francisco Business Times reported, citing The New York Times.
Twitter jettisoned four floors after missed rent payments as part of a dramatic cost-cutting strategy, unidentified sources said. The New York Times reported Musk consolidated offices onto two floors, after closing four.
The company has laid off thousands of workers, including 800 based in San Francisco, weeks after it was acquired by Musk.
Shorenstein Properties, which owns the building with JPMorgan, is negotiating with lenders after missing a September deadline to refinance its $400 million loan on the property, according to reporting by The Real Deal.
San Francisco-based Shorenstein sold 98 percent of its interest in the two Mid-Market buildings that make up Market Square to JP Morgan for $900 million in 2015 just before opening the interest-only loan. Shorenstein declined to comment on the refinance.
Twitter has leased offices at Market Plaza since 2011.
The city’s Department of Building Inspection opened an investigation into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters after a complaint alleging Twitter had set up bedrooms for employees, purportedly under Musk’s intense-work dictate.
What’s happening inside the Twitter headquarters isn’t pretty, according to media reports.
After Musk fired janitorial staff that went on strike, the headquarters lost its standard of cleanliness and now smells like takeout food and body odor, the New York Times reported, citing anonymous sources inside the company.
Since buying Twitter for $44 billion last October, Musk has reduced Twitter to a bare-bones operation and employees are under a “zero-based budgeting” mandate to justify spending. The purchase left it saddled with debt, requiring Musk to pay $1 billion in interest annually.
With no janitors cleaning and restocking bathrooms, workers had to bring their own toilet paper.
Musk, responding on Twitter, said employees only had to bring their own bath tissue for “half a day.”
Musk also shut down critical servers in Sacramento to save money, with some employees forced to come in on Christmas Eve to fix internal systems that went offline.
The company gave up its Seattle office after facing eviction and reportedly has plans to ditch its New York office in Chelsea.
Musk said at a live forum last week that Twitter still has more than 2,000 employees, shortly after he cut 50 people from its infrastructure and 15 from its public policy teams. Twitter has had to hire people after the mass layoffs left critical gaps in its workforce.
— Dana Bartholomew
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