Twitter has been sued for unpaid rent of $136,260, arrears that have accrued since its takeover by Elon Musk, The Guardian reported, citing News.ro.

The building’s owner claims the social media company owes back rent on its California Street headquarters in San Francisco. His accusations come amid Elon Musk’s efforts to cut costs at Twitter as close to zero as possible, which apparently includes late rent payments for some of the company’s offices.

The owner of the building at 650 California St., which is not Twitter’s main San Francisco headquarters, filed a lawsuit last week accusing Twitter of owing $136,260 in unpaid rent for its 30th-floor offices.

On December 16, the man sent a message to the social media company that he would not pay within five days. According to the documents he submitted to the court, these five days passed without payment.

The landlord, Columbia REIT 650 California LLC, is seeking a full refund of rent, as well as attorney’s fees and other costs.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on the news that Elon Musk has disbanded its public relations department, as it did with Tesla.

Elon Musk compares Twitter to a plane hurtling toward the ground

The South African billionaire bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, and the deal will see the company pay about $1 billion a year in taxes. Most of Musk’s fortune is tied to his shares in Tesla shares, which have lost more than half their value since he became the owner of Twitter.

In April, Musk sold nearly $23 billion worth of shares in the electric car company to finance the acquisition as he began to gain a foothold on Twitter.

Musk even lost the first place in the list of the richest people in the world according to the Forbes and Bloomberg agencies.

The billionaire defended his extreme cost-cutting measures last month in a late-night chat on Twitter Spaces.

“This company is basically like being in an airplane that is going down at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls not working,” Musk said on December 21.

The company’s headquarters are at another address in San Francisco, 1355 Market Street, where Twitter also allegedly failed to pay rent, the New York Times reported.

Twitter started selling office furniture at an auction

In addition to defaulting on rent and firing employees, Musk is also auctioning off luxury office furniture, kitchen equipment and other items from the company’s past, when Twitter had more than 7,500 full-time employees worldwide and provided free lunches and other services to employees. were frequent.

It is estimated that about three-quarters of Twitter employees have left the company either because they were fired or because they quit.

Among the items Twitter is auctioning off are a pizza oven, a 40-quart professional stand mixer (sold for around $18,000) and luxury designer furniture, such as Herman Miller Eames chairs and Knoll Diamond chairs, which sell for thousands of dollars.

Even the Twitter bird figurine (starting at $25) and the neon Twitter logo (starting at $50) are up for grabs at this fire sale, which harkens back to the dotcom crisis of the early 2000s, when failed tech startups sold off their extravagant office supplies , notes The Guardian.