'Over my dead body': Elon Musk refuses to pay rent for Twitter offices

Twitter CEO Elon Musk is now facing a lawsuit for refusing to pay rent for the company's offices in various cities.

The lawsuit has been filed in the US by six former Twitter employees. According to a report by Business Insider, Musk told an investor that he would only pay the rent "over his dead body."

Musk made the statement during a conversation with one of the investors of the company. The conversation has reportedly been added to the lawsuit.

"Killian attempted to convince Musk, via Mendoza (one of the investors), of the danger of Musk's new position that no rent would be paid whatsoever, pointing out that any attempt to renegotiate the terms of Twitter's many leases would be doomed to failure," reads an excerpt from the lawsuit.

The lawsuit further states that the company has also failed to compensate former employees with severance packages. Musk has also been sued by Twitter office landlords in London, New York City, and San Francisco for not paying the rent.

One of the plaintiffs, Joseph Killian, a former Twitter employee, revealed that Musk decided not to pay office rent sine December last year.

Four companies, including White Coat Captioning, YES Consulting, Cancomm, and Dialogue México, have also accused Musk of breaching their rental contracts.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk's attorney, Alex Spiro, has said that it is unreasonable for the aforementioned people to expect the company to pay rent because San Francisco was a "s**thole."

Former Twitter employees have made several claims about Elon Musk since the latter took over the company last year. Recently, one of his current employees claimed that Musk tried to sell office plants to staff in a bid to "boost revenue."

The claims were made by an anonymous Twitter employee during an interview with the BBC. He still works as an engineer at the firm, and he went on to add that Musk even fired the company's cleaning and catering staff.

He has also reportedly converted a few rooms at Twitter headquarters into bedrooms. According to media reports, the rooms have been furnished with mattresses, curtains, and work monitors and are meant to be used by the remaining "hardcore" staffers. The company turned several conference rooms into makeshift bedrooms for employees.

The development came after Musk asked employees to commit to a "hardcore" culture or leave with severance pay. He said that the company "will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade."

Musk claims that he bought "the world's largest non-profit for $44 billion" when he bought Twitter. He made the shocking statement in a Twitter post. "Say what you want about me, but I acquired the world's largest non-profit for $44B lol," he wrote.

Though the billionaire tried to back out of his impulsive bid that reportedly stemmed from a "420" weed joke, he could not back out of the agreement, and Musk was forced to offload more than $15 billion in Tesla shares to raise enough cash to fund the purchase.

He also says that he would sell the company if he found the right buyer for it, and maintains that it has been "quite painful" for him to run Twitter.

Musk, who also owns the companies Tesla and SpaceX, has taken several steps to earn more profits from his latest acquisition. He fired hundreds of employees last year as a cost-cutting measure, scrapped the work-from-home policy, and made Twitter Blue a paid service to make more money. He has even hired a new CEO to run the company.

He has appointed Linda Yaccarino as Twitter's new CEO. She was the former advertising head of NBCUniversal and will be taking over within a few weeks. It now remains to be seen if Yaccarino manages to keep things in order and, at the same time, keep Musk happy and Twitter profitable.