Twitter closes Seattle office as Musk continues to slash company spending

Twitter is closing down its Seattle office and instructing employees to work from home.

The social media company is reportedly facing eviction from Seattle’s Century Square Tower because the tech giant has stopped paying rent. Twitter has been at the location since 2014 and the space can accommodate 200 employees.



Twitter has been cutting costs per the direction of CEO Elon Musk. Most recently the company announced an auction of office equipment, décor, and other items from their San Francisco headquarters to be held in January. The company has also reportedly stopped paying rent on the Bay Area headquarters.

The New York Times reported that Twitter cut security and janitorial services at the Seattle office, which left some employees having to bring their own toilet paper to the office.

According to Zoe Schiffer, managing editor at the tech news outlet Platformer, employees at the Seattle office have been told to work remotely via email.

The Seattle Times reported that 208 of the Seattle workers were laid off in November after Musk sliced the company’s 7,500-person workforce in half. The New York Times previously reported that since Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the company, the workforce is down 75 percent.

Musk said during a live Twitter forum earlier this month that the company was on track to have a "negative cash flow situation" of $3 billion next year. 

Before Musk's takeover of Twitter the company was "only occasionally profitable" according to NPR. The company has a $13 billion dollar debt, a figure that is seven times greater than its projected 2022 earnings.

Musk, who is also the CEO of Space X and Tesla, said that the new Twitter verification system has been a new "revenue stream as well as a means of identifying, like, knowing that it's a real person and not a bot or a trial situation."