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Dorsey moved both of his companies, Square and Twitter, into the Tenderloin/Mid-Market area ~ 2012. They were given a 1.5% payroll tax by the city as the city + tech companies colluded to take over + gentrify this area. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/twitter-will-allow-employees-to-work-at-home-forever
Twitter + Square both brought a majority white male employee base into the area, and soon after moving in, Twitter IPOed, creating*1600* new multimillionaires overnight: https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-ipo-created-1600-millionaires-2013-11
SF got $6.75 million from tech cos moving there - that's one Twitter employee. Tech co's promises to "improve" the area - they didn't - retail vacancy went UP + “public perception that the community benefits program has been very weak—if not a joke,” https://sf.curbed.com/2019/6/7/18657092/twitter-tax-break-mid-market-hearing-haney
Now Twitter is gonna let its employees work from home forever -- and it's important to remember that the goals of all these tech companies building out offices was not just about giving their employees a place to work --
Rather, one of the biggest gains of the recent cloud computing tech bubble is really in real estate and finishing take over of the city by tech companies; Salesforce has been another huge driver of this.
And the city sold out to all of this for literally pennies on the dollar.
And the city sold out to all of this for literally pennies on the dollar.
Following Twitter's move into the area: "Fifty-nine new companies large enough to have to report their payrolls to the city either moved to, or were created in, Mid-Market."
And over that period, the number of people without homes increased by 1600 people https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/mid-market/city/
And over that period, the number of people without homes increased by 1600 people https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/mid-market/city/
the tech companies “helped the nonprofits, but they didn’t change the degree of displacement in the neighborhood and didn’t help stabilize the neighbors here,” -- so a bolstering of the non-profit space instead of direct aid / wealth distribution.
Neither Twitter or Square became profitable until 2018. That means that Dorsey moved thousands of multi-millionaires into, and executed a real estate takeover of, one of the last ungentrified areas of San Francisco, all without ever having made a dime.
Again: The true innovation of silicon valley is being able to pump millionaires, billionaires and monopolies on every business sector imaginable out of profitless companies. To use that to take-over and eat cities and markets. The tech VC model creates Dementor companies.
Twitter has only has in the neighborhood of 4,000-5,000 employees globally. They are not even significant job creators. Yet it has 35 offices around the world. That's an average of 142 employees per office
What kind of havoc is Twitter causing globally the same way it has in SF?
What kind of havoc is Twitter causing globally the same way it has in SF?
