London Breed, the Democrat Mayor of San Francisco, chose to go after new Twitter CEO Elon Musk and found some extremely hefty criticism in return. On Tuesday, the city kicked of investigations into reports that Musk had altered a set of offices at the headquarters for the company into barracks-style bedrooms in order to go along with his new plans for an “extremely hardcore” workforce for Twitter.
“San Francisco building inspectors are launching an investigation into reports Twitter has converted several office rooms at its headquarters into sleeping quarters for employees,” stated Ted Goldberg, the Supervising Senior Editor for KQED. “‘We need to make sure the building is being used as intended’ [SF Department of Building Inspection] rep tells @KQEDnews.”
Musk answered this, stating, “So city of SF attacks companies providing beds for tired employees instead of making sure kids are safe from fentanyl. Where are your priorities @LondonBreed!?”
The response to Breed from Musk also sported a link to an article out of the San Francisco Chronicle concerning a 10-month-old baby that reportedly overdosed on fentanyl in the wake of being exposed to the drug powder while playing at a public playground.
The city kicked off an investigation in the wake of Forbes chiming in with a report that employees for the titanic social media platform had “modest bedrooms featuring unmade mattresses, drab curtains and giant conference-room telepresence monitors.”
Another room showed a plant, explained the article, while another showed vibrant orange carpet “a wooden bedside table and what appears to be a queen bed, replete with a table lamp and two office armchairs just begging for convivial workplace collaboration.”
The oddly modified rooms seemed to be an update from another picture that had started to get some traction back in November which showed one employee asleep inside of a sleeping bag all tucked behind a table in the office.
“When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” stated Esther Crawford, the employee. “Since some people are losing their minds I’ll explain: doing hard things requires sacrifice (time, energy, etc). I have teammates around the world who are putting in the effort to bring something new to life so it’s important to me to show up for them & keep the team unblocked.”
When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork https://t.co/UBGKYPilbD
— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) November 2, 2022
I work with amazingly talented & ambitious people here at Twitter and this is not a normal moment in time. We are less than 1wk into a massive business & cultural transition. People are giving it their all across all functions: product, design, eng, legal, finance, marketing, etc,” she went on. “I love my family and I’m grateful they understand that there are times where I need to go into overdrive to grind and push in order to deliver. Building new things at Twitter’s scale is very hard to do. I’m lucky to be doing this work alongside some of the best people in tech.”
