Twitter is reportedly continuing to cut costs at its San Francisco headquarters by shrinking its office space.
According to The New York Times, the social networking platform currently owned and run by billionaire Elon Musk has reduced its headquarters by two-thirds at 1355 Market Street.
According to unnamed insiders, Twitter discarded four floors due to missed rent payments as part of a drastic cost-cutting effort. According to the New York Times, Musk consolidated offices onto two levels after closing four.
After being acquired by Musk, the company laid off thousands of employees, including 800 in San Francisco.
According to The Real Deal, Shorenstein Properties, which owns the building with JPMorgan, is negotiating with lenders after missing a September deadline to renegotiate its $400 million debt on the property.
Based in San Francisco, Shorenstein sold 98 percent of its investment in Market Square’s two Mid-Market buildings to JP Morgan for $900 million in 2015, just before the interest-only loan was authorized.
The city’s Department of Building Inspection started an investigation into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters following a complaint claiming that the company had built up dormitories for staff, ostensibly to comply with Musk’s intense work schedule.
According to media sources, what’s happening inside Twitter’s headquarters isn’t pretty. According to the New York Times, when Musk fired janitorial personnel who went on strike, the office lost its standard of cleanliness and now smells like takeaway food and body odor.
Musk has reduced Twitter to a bare-bones operation since purchasing it for $44 billion last October, and employees are subject to a “zero-based budgeting” mandate to justify spending. In addition, the purchase left it in debt, requiring Musk to pay $1 billion in interest each year.
Workers had to bring their own toilet paper as there were no janitors to clean and refill the bathrooms. Responding on Twitter, Musk stated that staff only needed to get their own bath tissue for “half a day.”
Musk also shut down critical servers in Sacramento to save money, forcing some employees to work on Christmas Eve to repair internal systems that had gone down.
After facing eviction, the company closed its Seattle office and is apparently about to close its New York headquarters in Chelsea.
Musk stated at a live discussion last week that Twitter still employs over 2,000 people, just days after laying off 50 individuals from its infrastructure and 15 from its public policy departments. Following the major layoffs, Twitter now has to hire new employees.
