Twitter auctions off blue bird memorabilia, pricey furniture

A neon Twitter hen for $35,000, anybody? How a couple of used industrial kitchen mixer for a very good worth? Going as soon as ….

When Elon Musk desires to make a degree, it may be fairly blunt. On the day he took over Twitter final fall, he walked in to the San Francisco firm’s headquarters carrying a sink. He tweeted “let that sink in.” Get it?

After slashing the corporate’s workforce, falling behind on lease and contract obligations, Twitter below the mercurial billionaire is now auctioning off memorabilia, fancy workplace furnishings {and professional} kitchen gear from its San Francisco places of work, the place massive swaths now sit empty and free meals are a relic of the previous.

With the public sale, Musk’s message is twofold: name consideration to the perceived excesses of Twitter’s earlier administration whereas signalling that value reducing — in any respect prices — is a high precedence.

The gadgets fetching the very best bids, in addition to the neon hen, embody a plain Twitter hen statue at over $30,000 and a planter sculpture of the “@” image. Professional kitchen gear, in the meantime, goes for tens of 1000’s of {dollars}. These embody a business dehydrator, a fryer and a La Marzocco Strada semi-automatic espresso machine, which retails for round $25,000 (the highest bid as of Wednesday morning was $12,000)

Even when all added up, the cash raised from the public sale, which closes Wednesday, is unlikely to make a dent in Twitter’s monetary obligations.

Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October and the corporate is on the hook for about $1 billion a yr in curiosity funds from the deal. Most of Musk’s wealth is tied to his possession of Tesla shares, which have misplaced greater than 40% of their worth since he took possession of Twitter in late October. He offered almost $23 billion value of the electrical car firm’s inventory to fund the acquisition since April, when he began constructing a place in Twitter. He’s even misplaced the highest spot for the world’s wealthiest particular person, in accordance with Forbes.

Twitter, which not has a media relations division, didn’t instantly reply to a message for remark Wednesday.

Musk defended his excessive value reducing measures in December in a late evening Twitter Spaces name.

“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 mentioned on Dec. 21.