Twitter CEO Elon Musk is cutting costs at his struggling company right to the bone, even firing janitors, which is reportedly forcing some staffers to bring in their own toilet paper.
Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters — and the company’s Seattle office — are getting smelly and gross after Musk boasted that he’s “cutting costs like crazy.”
Compounding the issue are moldy takeout meals and workers now jammed onto two floors at Twitter headquarters after four other floors were shut down.
“The smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors ... bathrooms have grown dirty,” The New York Times reported Thursday, citing accounts from employees. With janitors gone, some “workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home.”
Musk suddenly canceled janitorial services early this month at the headquarters, NBC News reported. Janitors said they were locked out with no warning, just weeks before the holidays, after they had sought better wages, and the company terminated a cleaning contract.
One janitor, who told the BBC he’d worked at Twitter for 10 years, said he was told by Musk’s team that eventually his job wouldn’t even exist because robots would replace human cleaners.
But the robots haven’t shown up yet.
Musk has also shut down servers operating a critical data center in Sacramento, according to the Times, and Twitter has reportedly simply stopped paying millions of dollars in rent and for various services.
Musk was apparently compelled to take drastic action to save the struggling operation. He described the company in a Dec. 20 Twitter Spaces talk as “basically ... a plane that is headed toward the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work.”