Following Elon Musk’s decision to auction office items from the social media platform’s headquarters in San Francisco, a bird logo statue has sold for $100,000. Bidding for the nearly four-foot tall statue closed at 1:50 p.m. EST. The auction was held by Heritage Global Partners and featured furniture, decorations, kitchen equipment, electronics and more, with in excess of 600 items up for sale.
The statue appears to be the most expensive item sold as part of the sale of Twitter’s “surplus corporate assets,” topping the more than $17,000 paid for a neon light-up bird logo. Among the 631 lots were espresso machines, ergonomically correct desks, televisions, bicycle-powered charging stations, pizza ovens and a decorative planter shaped like an “@” sign.
Twitter’s mass unloading of office relics and supplies comes amid a broad corporate restructuring under Musk, who fired most of the company’s top executives on the day his $44 billion purchase of the company was finalized, installing himself as CEO. As he set out to hire a new CEO for his struggling social media network, Musk claimed in December that drastic cost cutbacks at Twitter had fixed the company’s poor financial situation. At the time, the erratic billionaire claimed in a live chat room that Twitter would have lost $3 billion annually without the reforms, which included sacking more than half of its staff.
Twitter itself is not looking in a good position as it lost $270 million in the three-month period ending in 2022, the last quarter for which the data is publicly available. Racist or offensive tweets also increased after Musk’s takeover, which attracted regulatory attention and drove away major advertisers, Twitter’s primary source of income. Mass layoffs, the reinstatement of blocked accounts, and the suspension of journalists who criticise the wealthy South African-born Elon Musk have all contributed to the instability that has gripped Musk’s Twitter.