CAPE CANAVERAL: According to a lawsuit filed by the landlord, Twitter Inc. stopped paying rent on its San Francisco headquarters in December under the ownership of new owner Elon Musk.
In a lawsuit that was filed on Monday in a state court in California, the owner of the building, Sri Nine Market Square LLC, claimed that the social media company failed to pay the $3.42 million rent for January and the $3.36 million rent for December for its offices at 1355 Market Street.
The billionaire has been cutting costs ever since he took control of Twitter. He has let go of half the employees, withheld rent from the company's other international offices, and refused to pay some outstanding bills, like a jet charter. These measures come at a time when Musk has to make his first payment on the $12.5 billion debt he took on to buy Twitter.
In addition, Musk is being called as a witness in a securities fraud trial in San Francisco, where he is defending his tweet that called for the privatization of Tesla Inc. He is scheduled to return on Tuesday to conclude his testimony.
According to the complaint, Twitter rents more than 460,000 square feet of space on eight floors of the San Francisco building. Sri Nine Market Square held a letter of credit for $3.6 million as security. If Twitter lost control, as Musk did when he bought the company for $44 billion in October, Twitter had to raise the amount to $10 million.
The complaint states that Twitter argued that it was not required to increase the credit line.
Sri Nine stated that it used the existing line of credit to pay the $3.36 million in rent for December and a portion of the $1 million in rent for January, leaving the line of credit with a balance of $1.
Sri Nine wants to get the unpaid rent back and a court order that Twitter broke the lease by not increasing the credit line to $10 million.
A request for comment was not received from Twitter, whose public relations department has been eliminated.
Sri Nine Market Square LLC v. Twitter Inc., CGC-23-604136, County of San Francisco, Superior Court of California.