A neon Twitter bird for $35,000, anyone? How about a used industrial kitchen faucet at a good price? I’ll go there sometime…
When Elon Musk wants to make a point, he can be pretty clear. The day he took over Twitter last fall, he walked into the company’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a sink. He tweeted “let him in”. Take him?
After slashing the company’s workforce, falling behind on rent and contractual obligations, Twitter, under the mercurial billionaire, is now auctioning memorabilia, luxury office furniture and professional kitchen equipment from its offices in San Francisco, where large areas are now empty and free tables are available. a relic. from the past.
With the auction, Musk’s message is twofold: to call attention to the perceived excesses of Twitter’s previous administration, while also signaling that cutting costs at any cost is a top priority.
Items receiving the highest bids, in addition to the neon bird, include a simple statue of a Twitter bird at more than $30,000 and a gardener sculpture with the “@” symbol. Professional kitchen equipment, meanwhile, costs tens of thousands of dollars. These include a La Marzocco Strada commercial dehydrator, an air fryer and a semi-automatic espresso machine that retail for around $25,000 (the highest bid as of Wednesday morning was $12,000)
Even all things considered, the money raised from the auction, which ends Wednesday, is unlikely to affect Twitter’s financial obligations.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October, and the company is set for about $1 billion a year in interest payments from the deal. Most of Musk’s wealth is tied to his Tesla stock holdings, which have lost more than 40 percent of their value since he took ownership of Twitter in late October. He sold nearly $23 billion of shares in the electric vehicle company to fund the acquisition in April as he began building a position in Twitter. He even lost first place to the richest man in the world, according to Forbes.
Twitter, which no longer has a media relations department, did not immediately respond to a message for comment Wednesday.
Musk defended his extreme cost-cutting measures in December in a late-night call on Twitter Spaces.
“This company is like basically being in an airplane going down at high speed with the engines on and the controls not working,” Musk said on Dec. 21.
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