FORMER Twitter employees have filed a lawsuit against CEO Elon Musk, claiming the billionaire’s leadership team broke the law after he turned the company’s headquarters into a “Twitter Hotel.”
San Francisco officials are now launching an investigation into Musk after he took over the company in October 2022.
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It comes after six former employees filed a lawsuit in a Delaware federal court alleging that Twitter didn’t give them their promised severance pay.
They also claimed that Musk’s team ordered several changes to the company’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco that violated building codes.
These alleged changes included disabling lights and adding locks that wouldn’t open during an emergency, according to the lawsuit.
Another alleged alteration was the proposal of a bathroom built next to Musk’s office so he didn’t have to wake up his bodyguards in the middle of the night to go pee.
A Twitter engineer told the BBC in March that Musk is flanked by at least two bodyguards around the headquarters, including to the bathroom.
The lawsuit says that Boring Company CEO, Steve Davis, told Joseph Killian – a plaintiff who worked at Twitter for 12 years overseeing office design – to work on a new bathroom closer to Musk’s office.
Musk reportedly wanted it next to his office so he “didn’t have to wake his security team and cross half the floor to use the bathroom in the middle of the night,” read the lawsuit.
Killian told Davis that he would get the permits for Musk’s new bathroom but, according to the lawsuit, David reportedly said: “We don’t do that; we don’t have to follow those rules.”
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The lawsuit alleges that Davis suggested that Killian hire an unlicensed plumber to build the toilet because others wouldn’t want to risk losing their license by working on a project without a permit.
Tracy Hawkins, the former vice president of real estate and workplace on Twitter and was responsible for managing the company’s physical offices and leases is one of the plaintiffs.
According to the lawsuit, Hawkins wasn’t opposed to Musk’s takeover as CEO at first but “was forced to resign when Elon Musk and his transition team insisted that she violate her professional ethics by causing Twitter to intentionally breach its leases and other contracts.”
The lawsuit also claims that Musk refused to pay rent on the building.
Musk tweeted shortly after the lawsuit was made public, calling the accusation an “absurd scenario.”
“Even were this absurd scenario true, my ‘bodyguards’ being asleep instead of thwarting assassins would be of far greater concern to me than shortening my trip to the [toilet],” he said.
Musk and Twitter’s parents company X Corp. now face an investigation over building code violations at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, according to online public records with the county’s Department of Building Inspection, as reported by the SFChronicle.
HARD WORK
The “Twitter Hotel” was first reported in December 2022 when it was revealed Musk converted conference spaces into “sad little conference-room sleeping quarters,” Forbes reported.
This allowed exhausted employees to rest without having to leave the office physically.
The conference room-bedroom hybrids were adorned with unmade mattresses, curtains, and large TV monitors, Forbes reported, based on a photo the publication had seen.
One converted bedroom reportedly featured bright orange carpeting, a wooden bedside table, and a queen bed.
According to one of Forbes’ sources, no announcement was made to employees beforehand.
“It’s not a good look,” a source told the publication.
“It’s yet another unspoken sign of disrespect. There is no discussion. Just like, beds showed up.”
Creating sleeping spaces at the office isn’t out of the ordinary for Musk, who earlier this year said he was living in his offices.
“I was living in the factory in Fremont and the one in Nevada for three years straight,” he said during a conference in November.
“Those were my primary residences.”
It’s not clear at the moment how many bedrooms exist, but sources speculate it’s around “four to eight per floor.”
The U.S. Sun has reached out to Twitter for comment, it auto-replied with a poop emoji.
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