Twitter auction’s highest bid was $100K; it could owe $300M next week
Enlarge (credit: ANGELA WEISS / Contributor | AFP)
Twitter owes $13 billion, and it’s expected to make its first payment against that debt next week, Bloomberg reports. Due to this looming financial burden, CEO Elon Musk has been doing everything he can to cut costs—including directing mass layoffs, skipping rent payments, and slashing employee benefits. But even those major cost-cutting moves weren’t enough to keep Musk from turning to penny-pinching. Twitter held an auction this week that was essentially a garage sale, selling off equipment no longer needed by Twitter’s drastically reduced staff.
The liquidation of Twitter’s corporate office assets occurred during an online auction that ended yesterday, seemingly generating thousands from the sales of more than 600 items, including kitchen equipment, furniture, electronics, and memorabilia.
The auction site, Heritage Global Partners, chose not to publish the auction results, so it’s impossible to tell at a glance how big a dent the auction put in Twitter’s overall debt. Heritage Global Partners President Nick Dove told Fortune last month that the auction had “nothing” to do with Twitter’s dire finances.