Science & Tech

Elon Musk suggests turning Twitter's San Francisco HQ into a homeless shelter

Elon Musk suggests turning Twitter's San Francisco HQ into a homeless shelter
Elon Musk Becomes Twitter's Biggest Shareholder With $2.9 Billion Stock Purchase
Independent

Elon Musk, the new majority stakeholder at Twitter, has suggested turning the social media giant's San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter as "no one turns up anyway."

The South African billionaire acquired his majority stake in the tech firm earlier this week and has already begun to shake things up at the company with talk of an edit button (although Twitter has confirmed that those plans were in place before he arrived) in the works.

Now Musk is appearing to suggest that the company no longer needs their Silicon Valley HQ, having only just reopened its offices to its staff on March 15th but attendance isn't mandatory, unlike some big tech firms like Google who have made it a requirement for their staffers to be in the office at least three days a week.

The Tesla CEO doesn't appear to think that is worthwhile though and launched a poll in the early hours on April 10th, asking his 81 million followers: Convert Twitter SF HQ to a homeless shelter since no one shows up anyway?

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At the time of writing, the poll has more than 933,000 votes and the overwhelming majority of people have voted in favour of turning the building into a homeless shelter.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Twitter had given its staff the option of working for home 'forever' before recently reopening their offices.

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal wrote on March 3rd: "It’s been almost two years since we closed our offices and travel and I’m excited to announce that we’re ready to fully open up business travel and all our offices around the world! Business travel is back effective immediately, and office openings will start on March 15."

This is just one of several tweets that Musk has posted in the last week which seem to suggest that he has big plans for Twitter. He's recently called out some of the biggest names on the platform such as Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift for not tweeting enough and has even jokingly suggested that he might remove the 'W' from Twitter's name to...yeah, you guessed it.

Musk, the world's wealthiest man, has also posted several memes appearing to mock the idea that he might have a major shake-up in mind for Twitter.


It was revealed earlier this week that Twitter will host a meeting between their staff and Musk after concerns were raised that the tech mogul will make "awful changes to company culture."

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