The last few months may not be the smoothest for Twitter with constant changes being announced in a matter of weeks if not days. Amidst the chaos, it seems Elon Musk’s Twitter has forgotten to collect the laptops from thousands of employees fired in the last couple of months. It’s no secret that Twitter is facing an acute financial crisis, so much so that Musk warned of a possible bankruptcy last month.
According to a report by Wired, some former Twitter employees who were fired in the past couple of months, have claimed that they still have the company laptops issued to them at the time of joining. Twitter’s former California-based software engineer Eric Frohnhoefer has claimed that he still has the MacBook Pro M1 Pro laptop given to him in an official capacity. Frohnhoefer was fired in November after confronting Musk via a tweet over Twitter’s statistics.
The laptop sits in his closet ‘collecting dust’ because these former Twitter employees have been locked out of the systems, rendering them useless, even in the short term. However, Frohnhoefer doesn’t mind the machine sitting useless in his closet. Some daring employees even planned to reset the machine in order to make it of some use.
On the other hand, Twitter’s failure to retrieve these laptops is leaving many former employees puzzled and frustrated, as they are still owed severance pay.
Two employees cited in the report, are worried that the laptops might end up risking their severance pay or even result in unnecessary litigation for keeping those machines.
Twitter is currently facing financial difficulties, with millions of dollars in unpaid rent and bills, and $13 billion owed to lenders who funded the takeover. In an effort to alleviate these financial woes, Twitter even auctioned off $1.5 million worth of furniture and equipment from its San Francisco headquarters, including small items such as keyboards and USB dongles. However, the company has left behind potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of assets in the form of corporate laptops issued to former employees.
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Businesses often take their laptops and other work machines back before providing clearance to the employee. This is not only done to protect proprietary data and but also to reduce the overall expenditure on infrastructure. There are still exceptions. Companies like Snap and Airbnb have intentionally let fired employees keep their respective work machines for personal use. But it is improbable that Musk and cash-strapped Twitter will be willing to let go of money (laptops) on the table, especially after seeing them auction inexpensive items like dongles.
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