Since acquiring Twitter for $44 billion in November, Elon Musk has been slashing costs at the company to free up money to help him pay off the billions of dollars he borrowed to finance the deal.
The self-titled “Chief Twit” initially declared that Twitter was losing over $4 million daily. Then, in December, after laying off half of Twitter’s nearly 7,500 employees, he predicted the company will “roughly” break even in terms of cash flow in 2023, but added that it will be “difficult.”
The extent of Musk’s penny-pinching has been closely followed in the media. And on Twitter, it has raised many eyebrows. Musk stopped paying rent on Twitter’s offices, leading to lawsuits. He stiffed vendors including for private jet flights taken by executives who previously worked for Twitter, leading to yet more litigation. And he started auctioning off Twitter’s office furniture now that there are so few employees left.
The latest on the chopping block is pricey software from Salesforce that Twitter employees use for tracking issues involving users and with the service itself, according to a screenshot of a Slack message viewed by Fortune. Twitter had planned to jettison the software, and the monthly payments that come with it, at the end of 2022, but amid employee pushback, the company delayed the plan by six months, according to a source at Twitter.
The employee told Fortune that there was no final word on replacing the Salesforce software, and it would be “silly if they aren’t prepared with a new system to take its place.” One option being discussed is using Jira, a cheaper ticket and project management service developed by Atlassian.
“Could be an [Elon Musk] bargaining tactic, too, like not paying rent,” the source said, hinting that Musk may be using the threat of dropping Salesforce’s software to cut a better deal.
The source added the company has “shed a ton of licenses in the last two weeks”—the industry term for software—and employees had to justify to management why they should keep certain licenses.
Twitter, which no longer has a communications department, could not be reached for comment.
