Twitter owner Elon Musk is cutting back on office space at the company’s San Francisco headquarters.
Key Details
- Twitter cuts its San Francisco office space from six floors to two.
- It is rumored that the company will also be cutting down on offices in Seattle and New York City.
- Musk says the office spaces need to be cut down to cut costs, and the building space is no longer needed after cutting a large number of employees.
Why it’s news
Twitter is going on another cost-cutting spree, this time cutting down the amount of office space at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.
Musk says Twitter is looking at a negative cash flow of about $3 billion next year—so he has been cutting costs everywhere, from slashing employee numbers to reducing office space.
Twitter cut its headquarters office from six floors down to two in San Francisco and is looking to cut its spaces in Seattle and New York in the future.
The company is also facing a lawsuit after not paying rent on one floor of office space in a separate San Francisco building. The building landlord Columbia Property Trust filed suit last week seeking $136,260 in unpaid rent, according to Yahoo Finance writer Eric Revell.
Twitter has been a challenge for Musk since he finalized his purchase in late October—most recently announcing that he is looking for a new CEO to take over the company.
Musk’s Time with Twitter
Musk has made many changes to Twitter in the short time he has owned the company.
After the Twitter deal was finalized, Musk began immediately making his mark on the company by sending Tesla engineers to meet with Twitter product leaders to ensure everything was in place for his takeover.
He then fired Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde. He also fired the entirety of the Twitter board and was named sole director of the company.
His next step—cutting 50% of Twitter’s remaining employees.
Not long after that, he started charging for a verified blue check mark on the app, which stirred up a bit of controversy. The check mark was previously reserved for celebrities and other verified individuals, but now anyone willing to pay could receive one.
That plan backfired as many people impersonated celebrities and other famous figures resulting in Musk having to pause the program and the re-launching later on.
He then added a feature called Community Notes, previously known as Birdwatch, that adds notes submitted by Twitter users under a tweet to explain what is said in the tweet and if it is misleading.
Later, he added incentives for advertisers to bring more advertisers back to the platform.
In all, Musk made many changes to the platform to get it back on its feet, but in the end, it seems it was all too much for the company, and Musk is officially ready to throw in the towel.