Elon Musk is auctioning Twitter HQ equipment — photos of what will be on offer

This comes after “Chief Twit” Elon Musk fired thousands of Twitter employees in the past few weeks, many of whom worked at the corporate head office. The eccentric billionaire took control of the company in late October 2022, following a drawn-out legal fracas with Twitter’s previous leadership over its data on bots and spam on the platform. The auction will take place over two days, from 07:00 PST (17:00 SAST) on 17 January 2023 until 10:00 PST (20:00 SAST) on 18 January 2023. All 265 lots are available on the auction’s online bidding page and carry opening bids ranging from $25 (R437) to $500 (R8,746). Office equipment up for auction includes Apple iMacs, Samsung and Sharp TVs on portable stands, NEC projectors, Google Jamboards, Android tablets, and Polycom phones and speakerphones. Hundreds of Knoll “task chairs” and sit-stand desks, and other soft and hard seating furniture are also up for grabs.

The kitchen equipment list includes some expensive industrial-grade hardware that suggests the Twitter office was the place to be when you get hungry. These included a rotisserie, commercial blenders and grinders, pizza ovens, refrigerators, beverage dispensers, grills, espresso machines, and “kegerators” — a special type of refrigerator for holding and dispensing kegged beer, gin and tonic, or cocktails. Free lunches are among the previous perks scrapped by Musk, who stated that free food cost Twitter’s headquarters $13 million every year. Musk has claimed that each lunch served cost upward of $400 (R6,993). That was due to wastage because Twitter staff were not coming into the office as often due to the platform embracing remote working. Musk has also scrapped this policy.

The list below summarises some of the kitchen equipment going up for auction: