X offers entire 800,000 square foot San Francisco headquarters for sublease: report

X Corp., previously known as Twitter, has put up its 800,000-square-foot headquarters complex at 9th and Market Streets for sublease. The company has been at the location since 2011. Real estate firm JLL confirmed to the San Francisco Chronicle that it has been hired to market X’s entire space.

The listing is for approximately 460,000 square feet of office space that X occupies inside the Market Street building that also includes an attached 330,000-square-foot building at 1 Tenth St. that the company previously listed for subleasing. It is currently unknown if the company is looking for new space in the city or elsewhere.

The Mid Market neighborhood was revitalized by the presence of the tech company but the city’s downtown has faced rising vacancies, as homelessness, drug use, and crime have plagued the area. The office and retail sector have been devastated by tenants fleeing the area. Before the revelation of X’s exodus, office space vacancy in the city sat at over 37 percent.

When billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter in a $44 billion deal in 2022, speculation began regarding the company’s future in San Francisco. Musk previously relocated the headquarters of his car company, Tesla, from California to Texas in 2021. After acquiring the tech giant, Musk rebranded the company “X” and began implementing cost-saving measures which included laying off half of the company’s staff. According to The Chronicle, on July 10, a lawsuit claiming that Musk refused to pay at least $500 million in severance to thousands of fired employees was dismissed. 

Musk had previously joked about converting the company’s headquarters to a homeless shelter, as a seeming dig at the city’s failure to address urban blight. In 2022, Musk also canceled a lease the company had signed in 2021 for a 66,000 satellite office in nearby Oakland and was also sued for allegedly falling behind on rent payments at the San Francisco headquarters. The city also balked at Musk converting some of Market Square’s office space into bedrooms for employees and removing the building’s Twitter sign and installing a giant, illuminated “X” without proper permits.