Twitter CEO Elon Musk is slashing the costs of his struggling new company and even firing janitors, reportedly forcing some staffers to bring their own toilet paper.
Getting Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco — and the company’s Seattle office smelly and gross after Musk boasted that he was “cutting costs like crazy”.
Workers now crowded into two floors of Twitter’s headquarters after four other floors were closed and moldy takeout food didn’t help.
“The smell of leftover takeout and body odor has lingered on the floors…bathrooms have gotten gross” and with the janitors gone, some “workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home”, The New York Times reported Thursday, citing employee bills.
Musk suddenly canceled cleaning services at its headquarters early this month, NBC News reported. Janitors said they were locked out without warning several weeks before the holiday after they sought better pay and the company canceled a cleaning contract.
A janitor, who told the BBC he had worked at Twitter for 10 years, said Musk’s team told him his job would eventually not even exist because robots would replace human cleaners.
But the robots haven’t shown up yet.
While the cleaning services cuts may be having the most dramatic impact on remaining workers right now, Musk also shut down servers serving a critical Sacramento data center, according to the Times. Twitter also reportedly just stopped paying millions of dollars in rent and for various services.
Musk was apparently forced to take drastic measures to save the struggling operation. He described the company in a Dec. 20 Twitter Spaces conversation as “basically…a plane flying at high speed to the ground with the engines on fire and the controls inoperative.”
