Faith Nyasuguta
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.
The online auction of “surplus corporate office assets of Twitter” lasted for over 24 hours and 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 reported.
There were 631 lots, among them espresso machines, ergonomically correct desks, televisions, bicycle-powered charging stations, pizza ovens and a decorative planter shaped like an “@” sign.
Late last year, Musk 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.
Reducing Costs
The mercurial billionaire told a live chat forum at the time that without the changes, including firing over half of Twitter’s employees, the social media giant would have bled $3 billion a year.
Musk noted that he had been “cutting costs like crazy” at the platform he bought for $44 billion.
A few weeks into his ownership of Twitter, Musk sacked about half of its 7,500-strong workforce, triggering concern that the company was understaffed to execute content moderation and spooking governments and advertisers.
According to Musk, his strategy was to massively reduce costs while building up revenue, and that a new subscription service called Twitter Blue, which grants users a sought-after blue tick for a fee, would help reach that goal.
In the US, the service costs $11 a month in the and is available on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating systems, according to a page on the company’s website.
Web subscriptions
Web subscriptions are also available for $8 per month or, at a discount, $84 per year.
At the moment, Twitter Blue available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and Japan.
Musk-led Twitter has been marred by chaos, mass layoffs, the return of banned accounts and the suspension of journalists critical of the South African-born billionaire.
The takeover by Musk also saw a jump in racist or hateful tweets, sparking scrutiny from regulators and chasing away big advertisers, Twitter’s main source of revenue.
