Bird Statue Fetches $100,000 As Elon Musk Auctions Twitter HQ Items
A Twitter bird statue fetched $100,000 on Wednesday as Elon Musk auctioned off furniture, decorations, kitchen equipment and more from the tech firm’s downtown San Francisco headquarters.
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An online auction of “surplus corporate office assets of Twitter” that lasted slightly more than 24 hours also featured a 10-foot neon light in the shape of Twitter’s bird logo, which brought in a winning bid of $40,000, Heritage Global Partners auction service confirmed.
Among the 631 lots were espresso machines, ergonomically correct desks, televisions, bicycle-powered charging stations, pizza ovens and a decorative planter shaped like an “@” sign.
Musk in December said that severe cost cuts at Twitter had repaired the company’s dire finances as he set out to find a new CEO for his troubled social media platform.
The mercurial billionaire told a live chat forum at the time that without the changes, including firing over half of Twitter’s employees, the company would have bled $3 billion dollars a year.
Musk said he had been “cutting costs like crazy” at the platform he bought for $44 billion.
Just weeks into his ownership of Twitter, Musk fired about half of its 7,500-strong workforce, sparking concern that the company was insufficiently staffed to carry out content moderation and spooking governments and advertisers.
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Musk said his strategy is to massively reduce costs while building up revenue, and that a new $8 subscription service called Twitter Blue would help with that goal.
Musk-led Twitter has been riven by chaos, with mass layoffs, the return of banned accounts and the suspension of journalists critical of the South African-born billionaire.
Musk’s takeover also saw a surge in racist or hateful tweets, drawing in scrutiny from regulators and chasing away big advertisers, Twitter’s main source of revenue.
