Twitter owes three months’ rent to its Boulder landlord, and a judge has signed off on evicting the tech giant from its office there, court documents show.
Since its takeover by Elon Musk, Twitter’s business has more or less fallen into disarray, and there have been numerous reports of unpaid bills. While a contractor going unpaid during a rocky transition is unfortunate but not uncommon, ceasing to pay rent altogether for months suggests Twitter’s operations may be farther gone than anyone expected.
According to court documents and reporting by the Denver Business Journal, Lot 2 SBO LLC, the Chicago-based landlord that owns Twitter’s office at 3401 Bluff St in Boulder, was provided a $968,000 letter of credit back in February of 2020. It has been drawing on this to pay the rent in lieu of ordinary payments (the details of this arrangement are somewhat obscure), but the money ran out in March, and the company has not paid since. (If we assume rent was paid regularly from that sum, that places it at around $27,000 per month, giving a sense of the values involved here.)
In May the landlord took it to court, and on May 31 the judge issued an order that the sheriff should assist in the eviction of Twitter within the next 49 days — i.e. before the end of July. The case number is 2023CV30342 in Boulder District Court.
As many as 300 employees once worked in Twitter’s Boulder offices, but between layoffs, other firings, and resignations, it is probably less than half of that now.
TechCrunch confirmed the legal records cited by the Denver Business Journal, but the Sheriff’s office explained it could not comment on matters until they were concluded. In the course of looking up the case another appeared apparently confirming a separate case in which a cleaning company is seeking $93,504 in unpaid fees from the company.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/25/elon-musk-twitter-everything-you-need-to-know/
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