Whee! Betcha Mr. Musk is having fun pointing out all the things he’s going to get rid of. Will he be moving the headquarters to Texas, too, possibly down the street from his Tesla organization?
[Dawn] A Twitter bird statue fetched $100,000 on Wednesday as Elon Musk auctioned off furniture, decorations, kitchen equipment and more from the tech firm’s downtown the Socialist paradise of San Francisco...where God struck dead Anton LaVey, home of the Sydney Ducks, ruled by Vigilance Committee from 1859 through 1867, reliably and volubly Democrat since 1964...
headquarters.
An online auction of "surplus corporate office assets of Twitter" that lasted slightly more than 24 hours also featured a 10-foot neon light in the shape of Twitter’s bird logo, which brought in a winning bid of $40,000, Heritage Global Partners auction service confirmed.
Among the 631 lots were espresso machines, ergonomically correct desks, televisions, bicycle-powered charging stations, pizza ovens and a decorative planter shaped like an "@" sign.
Musk in December said that severe cost cuts at Twitter had repaired the company’s dire finances as he set out to find a new CEO for his troubled social media platform.
The mercurial billionaire told a live chat forum at the time that without the changes, including firing over half of Twitter’s employees, the company would have bled $3 billion a year. Musk said he had been "cutting costs like crazy" at the platform he bought for $44 billion.
Just weeks into his ownership of Twitter, Musk fired about half of its 7,500-strong workforce, sparking concern that the company was insufficiently staffed to carry out content moderation and spooking governments and advertisers.
Musk said his strategy was to massively reduce costs while building up revenue, and that a new subscription service called Twitter Blue, which grants users a sought-after blue tick for a fee, would help reach that goal.
The move comes months after laying off thousands of employees at Twitter, and then downsizing its headquarters.
The social media platform, which Musk took over in October in a whopping $44 billion deal, has reduced its space by two-thirds at 1355 Market St.
The move comes as Musk, 51, has been making major cuts to staff — even eliminating free meal options.
In December, Musk revealed that Twitter was not secured financially. "We have an emergency fire drill on our hands."
"Twitter isn’t secure yet, just not in the fast lane to bankruptcy. Still much work to do," Musk later Tweeted.
After missing rent payments, Twitter has now gone from six floors to occupying only two.
Twitter laid off about half of its 7,500-employee global workforce in early November, as Musk enacted a drastic cost-cutting plan. This included 800 who were based in the Socialist paradise of San Francisco
...where God struck dead Anton LaVey, home of the Sydney Ducks, ruled by Vigilance Committee from 1859 through 1867, reliably and volubly Democrat since 1964...
The company is also reportedly set to close its Seattle
...a formerly lovely city in Washington state, governed by communists, anarchists, dipshits, and other sorts of incompetents. Home to Starbuck's, Boeing (at least for now), and Amazon, Microsoft, and Costco, the city became rich beyond its wildest dreams. All that money attracted the usual sort of grifting politician, and it's well on its way to chewing off the hand that feeds it...and New York City offices in an effort to cut costs.
And from NPR:
Ross Dove, chief executive of Heritage Global, the parent company of Heritage Global Partners, told the New York Times that more than 20,000 people had registered to bid online — the most of any of the firm's auctions over the last 90 years and a fact he attributes to the public's fascination with Twitter and Musk himself. He estimated that the auction would net Twitter some $1.5 million.