Twitter hasn’t paid rent for months – now the police are supposed to clear the offices

eviction ordered
Twitter hasn’t paid rent for months – now the police are supposed to clear the offices

For months, new owner Elon Musk Twitter has prescribed a radical austerity course. The fact that rents are not paid now has consequences.

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter last fall, the short message service has had one overarching goal: to finally make money. In return, the company is making savings everywhere – and is apparently increasingly leaving bills unpaid. This now has consequences for the branch in Colorado: The office in Boulder should be vacated by the police by the end of July at the latest.

This is reported by the “Denver Business Journal”, citing a court decision. Accordingly, the group has not paid any rent for the 6,000 square meter office space since March. Several requests for payment were also not complied with. At the end of May, the court involved had had enough: it ordered the sheriff’s office to throw the company out of the building within 49 days.

No payment for months

The rental situation is a bit unusual. According to the court documents, Twitter had given the landlord a guarantee of almost one million US dollars when the rent was not paid in 2020. In a procedure that was also rated as rather unusual by the American media, the rent of the last few years was apparently paid via this guarantee. Until the money ran out in March.

The landlord then asked the company to make a new payment as contractually agreed. However, Twitter did not comply with this request.

It is not clear whether this is a conscious decision or negligence. Twitter apparently did not respond to the requests. Press inquiries were also only answered with the well-known automatic answer with the turd emoji. Since the spring, the group has only responded in this form to requests for comment at the behest of Musk.

“Over my corpse”

However, there seems to be a system behind the unpaid bills. According to court documents, another office in the city also owes nearly $100,000 in cleaning costs, and rent is said not always to have been paid. Shortly after the takeover, there were initial reports that Musk’s company had stopped paying rent at many locations. There had already been lawsuits in San Francisco, London and New York. According to the latest reports, the fees for the Google servers, via which Twitter is partially operated, are currently not being paid.

Musk himself is said to have made a very clear commitment to the strategy internally. A statement by Musk is also cited in a lawsuit filed by an investor and former employee. When an investor tried to persuade the Twitter boss to pay the rent, he is said to have replied “over my dead body”.

financial challenge

Even before the takeover, Twitter had money problems, but they only got worse under Musk. Although the new owner had prescribed a radical austerity course for the company and tried to generate new income with the subscription offer Twitter Blue, both plans have had the opposite effect so far. As extremist content proliferated due to staff shortages and the chaos surrounding account verification, more and more advertisers turned away from Twitter and revenue plummeted.

This is also increasingly reflected in the value of the company. After Musk paid $44 billion for the acquisition, a major investor estimates that the company is now only worth a third of its purchase price. The increasing legal problems should not improve this assessment.

Sources: Denver Business Journal, Business Insider, Guardians