Elon Musk and Twitter face San Francisco city probe over headquarters
In an aerial view, a modified company sign is posted on the exterior of the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, April 10, 2023.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Elon Musk and X Corp. — the Musk-backed parent company of social media platform Twitter — face an investigation over building code violations at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters on Market Street, according to online public records with the county’s Department of Building Inspection.
The probe, which was previously reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, follows a lawsuit filed May 16 in Delaware court by six former Twitter employees, who allege Musk’s “transition team” knowingly and repeatedly ordered them to break local and federal laws, including by making unsafe modifications to the company’s office space.
The lawsuit alleges under Musk’s management, X Corp. directed employees to turn rooms in the San Francisco headquarters office into “hotel rooms,” while lying to inspectors and their landlord they were just “temporary rest spaces” with some comfortable furniture added and no substantive or structural changes.
The lawsuit says one employee was told to place locks on the unauthorized “hotel room” doors that did not meet a California code which “requires locks that automatically disengage when the building’s fire suppression systems are triggered.”
The ex-Twitter employee said in the complaint Musk’s transition team repeatedly told them “compliant locks were too expensive” and instructed them instead to “immediately install cheaper locks that were not compliant with life safety and egress codes.”
The employee quit rather than break that law, their attorneys noted in the lawsuit.
The complaint also alleges Musk-led Twitter failed to pay the employees severance, back pay and benefits they were owed, and discriminated against some senior employees on the basis of age, gender and sexual orientation when it decided to terminate them.
Additionally, the lawsuit said Musk and members of his transition team, namely Boring Company executive Steve Davis, ordered employees involved in the management of real estate to slash costs by $500 million as quickly as they could. In the drive to cut costs, the Musk transition team told employees to simply refuse to pay landlords who were owed rent by the company.
When informed of the risks of termination fees for certain leases, Davis told Twitter senior employees, “Well, we just won’t pay those. We just won’t pay landlords,” adding, “we just won’t pay rent,” the complaint says.
Meanwhile, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez is actively courting Musk to move Twitter headquarters to his jurisdiction. On Friday, he wrote on Twitter, “let’s get them to MIA asap.”
CNBC reached out to Twitter for further information and the company responded with an automated response that included a poop emoji but no comment.
A representative for the Department of Building Inspection in San Francisco did not immediately respond to a request for further information.
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang looks on as US President Donald Trump speaks at the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC on November 19, 2025.
Brendan Smialowski | Afp | Getty Images
Nvidia on Tuesday said its tech remains a generation ahead of the industry, in response to Wall Street’s concerns that the company’s dominance of AI infrastructure could be threatened by Google’s AI chips.
“We’re delighted by Google’s success — they’ve made great advances in AI and we continue to supply to Google,” Nvidia said in a post on X. “NVIDIA is a generation ahead of the industry — it’s the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done.”
The post came after Nvidia saw its shares fall 3% on Tuesday after a report that Meta, one of its key customers, could strike a deal with Google to use its tensor processing units for its data centers.
In its post, Nvidia said its chips are more flexible and powerful compared with so-called ASIC chips — such as Google’s TPUs — which are designed for a single company or function. Nvidia’s latest generation of chips are known as Blackwell.
“NVIDIA offers greater performance, versatility, and fungibility than ASICs,” Nvidia said in its post.
Nvidia has more than 90% of the market for artificial intelligence chips with its graphics processors, analysts say, but Google’s in-house chips have gotten increased attention in recent weeks as a viable alternative to the Blackwell chips, which are expensive but powerful.
Unlike Nvidia, Google doesn’t sell its TPU chips to other companies, but it uses them for internal tasks and allows companies to rent them through Google Cloud.
Earlier this month, Google released Gemini 3, a well-reviewed state-of-the-art AI model that was trained on the company’s TPUs, not Nvidia GPUs.
“We are experiencing accelerating demand for both our custom TPUs and Nvidia GPUs,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We are committed to supporting both, as we have for years.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang addressed rising TPU competition on an earnings call earlier this month, noting that Google was a customer for his company’s GPU chips and that Gemini can run on Nvidia’s technology.
He also mentioned that he was in touch with Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind.
Huang said that Hassabis texted him to say that the tech industry theory that using more chips and data will create more powerful AI models — often called “scaling laws” by AI developers — is “intact.” Nvidia says that scaling laws will lead to even more demand for the company’s chips and systems.
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