San Francisco is investigating Twitter over alleged building code violations at its downtown headquarters, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
The investigation comes in response to a lawsuit filed by former employees against Twitter successor company X Corp. and its owner Elon Musk which revealed Musk’s team instructed staff to disable lights and install locks that wouldn’t open during an emergency at employee bedrooms.
That lawsuit, filed in a Delaware federal court on Tuesday, read: “Twitter’s new leadership deliberately, specifically, and repeatedly announced their intentions to breach contracts, violate laws, and otherwise ignore their legal obligations.”
“We will be opening a new complaint and conducting an investigation into these new allegations,” Patrick Hannan, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Building Inspection, told the Chronicle.
One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Joseph Killian, Twitter’s former lead project manager of global design and construction, said in the filing that the social media company repeatedly and knowingly broke building code violations while making bedrooms for employees to sleep in.
These violations reportedly included the removal of motion-sensitive lights because they were making it more difficult for employees to sleep, and the installation of cheap door locks that would not automatically unlock in the case of an emergency like a fire, earthquake or medical event.
The motion-sensitive lights were removed despite objections from the landlord of Twitter’s HQ, and the door locks were installed at the request of Elon Musk’s team in order to save money, Killian alleges.
Another plaintiff alleges that Twitter stopped paying vendors and its San Francisco HQ landlord. According to the lawsuit, a Musk advisor told one of the plaintiffs, that Musk had told him “he would only pay rent over [his] dead body.”
The lawsuit also alleges that Musk attorney Alex Spiro “loudly opined that it was unreasonable for Twitter’s landlords to expect Twitter to pay rent, since San Francisco was a shithole.”
Four of the six plaintiffs in the lawsuit additionally allege they were fired and not paid contractually required severance. As the Chronicle notes, they are seeking severance, punitive damages for “bad faith”, alleged fraud and violation of local and federal laws.
