Twitter CEO Elon Musk is cutting costs at his struggling new 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.”
Workers now jammed onto two floors at Twitter headquarters after four other floors were shut down and moldy takeout food aren’t helping.
“The smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors … bathrooms have grown dirty” and with janitors gone some “workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home,” The New York Times reported Thursday, citing accounts from employees.
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 that he had 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.
While the janitorial cuts may be most dramatically impacting remaining workers just now, Musk has also shut down servers operating a critical data center in Sacramento, according to the Times. Twitter has also 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.”
