Twitter employees based in Singapore -- Twitter's Asia Pacific headquarters -- were kicked out of the building on January 11. The reason? Twitter has not paid the rent for the building.
The Twitter employees were evicted and asked to vacate the office located in the CapitaGreen building. They were escorted out of the office by building staff, we were quoted as saying by Bloomberg, Friday (13/1/2023).
The status of these employees was then changed to remote employees in Twitter's internal system. This is ironic because Elon Musk previously required Twitter employees to work from the office, and threatened to fire his WFH employees for no apparent reason.
Twitter is not just in arrears on the cost of renting a building in Singapore. Many Twitter offices in various parts of the world are still in arrears of rent, including its headquarters in San Francisco, United States.
Even last week Twitter was sued in California for not paying rent for its headquarters in San Francisco, whose value was "only" USD 136 thousand, very little compared to the value of Twitter's acquisition by Elon Musk which reached USD 44 billion.
The stoppage of the lease payments for this building was at the direct order of Elon Musk, who asked his financial team to stop payments to Twitter partners until he had reviewed all of Twitter's expenses.
Last December, Twitter was also sued by a private jet service provider because it did not want to pay USD 200 thousand for the flights of a number of its employees, which had actually been approved by Twitter's management before it was taken over by Elon.
Elon Musk himself started 2023 by breaking the Guinness World Record, as the person who lost the biggest personal fortune in history.
The Guinness World Record refers to a Forbes report which estimates that Musk lost USD 183 billion or around Rp. 2,800 trillion in just one year. However, Bloomberg's estimate is much higher, namely USD 200 billion or around Rp. 3,100 trillion.
Musk's personal fortune hit a breaking point in November 2021 when his fortune crossed $340 billion thanks to the skyrocketing value of Tesla stock. Musk was immediately named the richest person in the world, a position he held for about a year.