May 29, 2025 at 10:52 AM MDT X Corp., the social media company formerly known as Twitter, has been ordered to pay more than $8 million to its former landlord in Boulder after a judge determined it broke its lease. “Twitter was not entitled to a credit for rent due on Dec. 1, 2022, and its nonpayment of rent for December and thereafter was a breach,” Judge Nancy Salomone wrote May 23. In 2020, Twitter agreed to lease 64,500 square feet of the 70,000-square-foot Railyards at S’PARK office building, which was then under construction at 3401 Bluff St. The lease called for the company to stay 10 years, until 2032. It lasted a little more than one year. Twitter stopped paying rent in late 2022, was evicted and sued its former landlord for wrongful eviction, and was sued for back rent. A five-day trial was held this past March. The triple-net lease between Twitter and S’PARK’s owners, The John Buck Co. in Chicago, provided Twitter with a tenant improvement allowance of $5.8 million. As Salomone noted in her verdict last week, “The central dispute in this litigation is whether Twitter satisfied the lease conditions precedent to accessing that tenant improvement allowance.” The 192-page lease for 3401 Bluff St. required Twitter to build out the property and send documentation proving that it had before it could collect the allowance. Twitter did the build-out work — at a cost of $40 million, by its own estimation — but, in the period following Elon Musk’s purchase of the company, never sent evidence of that to its landlord. Salomone was persuaded by a video deposition of Joseph Killian, a former Twitter executive, who testified that Twitter stopped paying rent in December 2022 as a “renegotiating tactic — a tactic to save money.” By comparison, the judge found trial testimony from Nicole Hollander, a top Musk aide who led Twitter’s real estate division, “not at all credible.” “This testimony suggests to the court that Twitter’s cessation of rent payment reflected business strategy rather than a bona fide belief in its entitlement to rent credit,” Salomone wrote. Because Twitter could not claim a rent credit in December 2022, its refusal to pay rent was a breach of its lease, the judge determined. With that, she ordered the company, which now goes by X Corp., to pay $8.3 million, plus interest and the Buck Co.’s attorney fees. Related Articles