A neon Twitter bird for $35,000, anyone? How about a used industrial kitchen mixer for a good price? Going once ....
When Elon Musk wants to make a point, it can be pretty blunt. On the day he took over Twitter last fall, he walked in to the San Francisco company's headquarters . He tweeted “let that sink in.” Get it?
After slashing , , Twitter under the mercurial billionaire is now , fancy office furniture and professional kitchen equipment from its San Francisco offices, where large swaths now sit empty and free meals are a relic of the past.
With the auction, Musk's message is twofold: call attention to the perceived excesses of Twitter's previous administration while signaling that cost cutting — at all costs — is a top priority.
The items fetching the highest bids, besides the neon bird, include a plain Twitter bird statue at over $30,000 and a planter sculpture of the “@” symbol. Professional kitchen equipment, meanwhile, is going for tens of thousands of dollars. These include a commercial dehydrator, a fryer and a La Marzocco Strada semi-automatic espresso machine, which retails for around $25,000 (the top bid as of Wednesday morning was $12,000)
Even when all added up, the money raised from the auction, which closes Wednesday, is unlikely to make a dent in Twitter's financial obligations.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October and the company is on the hook for about $1 billion a year in interest payments from the deal. Most of Musk’s wealth , which have lost more than 40% of their value since he took ownership of Twitter in late October. He sold nearly $23 billion worth of the electric vehicle company’s stock to fund the purchase since April, when he started building a position in Twitter. He’s even lost the top spot for the world’s wealthiest person, according to Forbes.
Twitter, which no longer has a media relations department, did not immediately respond to a message for comment Wednesday.
Musk defended his extreme cost cutting measures in December in a call.
“This company is like, basically, you’re in a plane that is headed towards the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work,” Musk said on Dec. 21.
