Mere weeks after being served with an eviction order to vacate its offices in Boulder, Colorado, social media platform Twitter is fighting back with claims it was wrongfully pushed out.
An affiliate of San Francisco-based Twitter filed a lawsuit against its former landlord, John Buck Co., alleging that the real estate firm owes Twitter money, not the other way around. The complaint follows a county judge's decision to issue an eviction notice to the tech company because of several months of missed rent payments.
The lawsuit, filed late last month in Boulder County District Court, said the tech company spent $40 million to build out the roughly 64,000-square-foot office at 3390 Valmont Road it leased from John Buck in early 2020. Twitter claims its landlord owes nearly $6 million to it or the contractors for those tenant improvements, terms of which were included in the lease agreement.
The tech company alleges it requested for those funds to be paid back prior to December of last year, but Chicago-based John Buck refused.
Under the lease terms, the landlord was supposed to pay $90 per square foot, or nearly $6 million, for tenant improvement expenses. Twitter claims it was also subject to a 10-month rent abatement period, which would have expired in February of this year.
However, the lawsuit states that John Buck in late 2022 “claimed that Twitter breached the lease by not paying its share of taxes and operating expenses.” Twitter responded by arguing the landlord should have used the nearly $6 million it owed the company in order to settle any unpaid bills.
Latest Legal Battle
The lawsuit is the latest legal conflict for the company owned by Elon Musk, who also is CEO of electric-car maker Tesla and founder of rocket firm SpaceX. The eviction ruling, filed in late May and in effect for 49 days, followed aggressive cost-cutting Twitter has enacted since Musk bought the company in October.
Twitter, which has been accused by landlords of refusing to pay rent for space it leases in cities from San Francisco to London, dismantled its media relations team as part of widespread layoffs implemented almost immediately after Musk took over as CEO. The company replied to CoStar News' emailed request for a comment with a poop emoji.
Representatives for John Buck Co. did not immediately respond.
Twitter's Boulder eviction order was issued about a month after John Buck filed its initial lawsuit that alleged Twitter hasn't paid rent since February for its Boulder office in the Railyards at S'Park mixed-use complex.
The landlord claimed Twitter is responsible for replenishing its nearly $1 million line of credit for the property if the landlord ever had to draw upon it. John Buck Co. did just that in order to meet the company's March rent payment. Twitter is bound to a 10-day requirement in order to refill the funds but failed to do so, according to the John Buck Co. complaint.
The landlord then served Twitter with a “demand for compliance or possession” in April, a step that meant the company needed to either vacate the property or replenish the line of credit funds. Twitter did neither, according to the complaint, pushing the property owner to escalate its efforts to evict the company and terminate Twitter's rights to the property.