Elon Reportedly Wants His Most ‘Hardcore’ Tweeps to Sleep in Beds at Twitter HQ

Kyle Barr
·3 min read
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Two people walk along the street toward a large brick building with a sign reading Twitter out front
Two people walk along the street toward a large brick building with a sign reading Twitter out front


Twitter staff at the San Francisco office reportedly came in Monday only to find that the company had installed beds in some of the unused space.

Imagine walking into work on a Monday after spending the weekend trying to decompress from the constant pressures to do more with less and meet the insurmountable expectations of your new boss. You’ve been harried not just by your own workload but by the constant news cycle reminding you that every day the job you’ve given years of your life to may soon be on the chopping block.

Then you walk though the doors to your office and find that your boss has started putting spartan bedrooms in the office space, as if to remind you “this is now your life.” According to a report from Forbes, this is exactly what Twitter employees encountered Monday at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. Forbes reported based on leaked photographs that the bedrooms came with unmade mattresses, orange carpeting, “drab” curtains and some desk chairs and monitors.

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Based on the report alone, it’s hard to tell how many rooms were converted into bedrooms in total, but the employee Forbes talked to said there were now “four to eight per floor.” Another anonymous source reported the beds were on a largely empty floor of the San Fran office, and that it could be an amenity for employees who were already putting in late hours.

Though, just like many employees dragging their bodies into work on a Monday might think, one employee also told Forbes that the beds at least looked “comfortable.”

Twitter’s new owner has a strange fascination with getting workers to spend practically all their time at their workplace. Earlier this year, Musk’s other big company Tesla had reportedly told workers at its Shanghai, China factory they would need to sleep at work to continue production during lockdowns amidst the covid pandemic. The company reportedly brought out sleeping bags and mattresses for them to sleep on the factory floor. Earlier in November, there were more reports of Twitter employees using sleeping bags inside the office after working late.

Of course, this leads to the question of who will be changing out the bed sheets and cleaning the rooms after tired and dusty Tweeps (what the company calls its internal staff) come back from the proverbial Twitter mines. As of Monday, the unionized contract janitors who worked at the San Francisco office went on strike after 20 of their members were reportedly axed, union reps told The New Republic. The janitors were picketing outside the office Monday morning. Tesla had previously fired hundreds of janitors and bus drivers in spring 2020, during the early pandemic months.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. The company has kept mum as far as the media is concerned after Musk’s takeover in October.

One anonymous employee quoted by Forbes said the company gave staff no notice that some of their office space was being converted into bedrooms. The act of putting bedrooms inside Twitter’s offices all seems to be part of billionaire owner Elon Musk’s attempts to “hardcore”-ify all those who survived cuts. Last month, Twitter demanded that employees sign up for a new “hardcore” version of Twitter or quit, but that didn’t work out so great when many employees reportedly went for a severance package instead.

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