The King of England is the landlord of the second richest man in the world.
And from the looks of it, he's a very disgruntled landlord.
The Crown State, the legal entity that manages properties belonging to Carlos III, has sued Twitter, the social network owned by magnate Elon Musk, for not having paid the rent for its headquarters in London.
The British company filed a lawsuit against Twitter in the High Court in London last week.
As reported by the British chain BBC, the alleged non-payment of rent refers to an office building near Piccadilly Circus, in central London.
According to
The Guardian
newspaper , the royal real estate company has confirmed that the legal action is related to "arrears in rent" of the platform's office space in the London capital.
This announcement coincides with the news published in
The New York Times
in the middle of last December.
Several sources indicated that "in order to cut costs, Twitter has not paid rent for its San Francisco headquarters or any of its global offices for weeks."
More information
Where does the money for the British royal family come from?
Since then, the landlord of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters has taken legal action against the company.
His Singaporean employees were even temporarily evicted from the office for non-payment of rent, before Musk finally paid that same day,
Business Insider reported.
The
The BBC reports that the Crown Estate has taken these legal actions against Twitter as a last resort, having previously contacted the company over alleged delays in paying rent for its offices.
Since Elon Musk bought the company last October for $44 billion, attempts have been made to cut losses with drastic measures.
These include mass layoffs, charging users for services that were hitherto free (the disastrous implementation of its
check
blue for verified users) or non-payment of office rent.
The measures have worked only halfway, as Musk's erratic direction and the rise of online hate speech have caused ad revenue to plummet.
Still, it's hard to know.
The company's latest public accounts are from 2021 and the credit rating agency Moody's has withdrawn Twitter's rating for lack of information on the company's status.
The non-payment of rent for their offices, however, can give some clues.
We have today announced the signing of Agreements for Lease for six #OffshoreWind projects for Leasing Round 4 - a major milestone that could see c.8GW of #GreenElectricity generated by the end of the decade, enough to power more than 7 million homes.
https://t.co/GTCu73pjqN pic.twitter.com/O7kugEWkYP
— The Crown Estate (@TheCrownEstate) January 19, 2023
For its part, the British royal house is one of the largest landowners in the United Kingdom.
It owns a portfolio of properties valued at 15.6 billion pounds (about 17.7 billion euros) that includes 241 stores in central London, including those that make up the important shopping street Regent Street.
They also own Ascot Racecourse, farms, forests and coastlines to add up to about 1.4% of England's land.
Although owned by the monarch, the Crown State isn't exactly private property.
Their income falls on the public treasury and in return the king receives the sovereign subsidy, equivalent to 15% of the benefits of this legal figure.
Despite the fact that his confrontation with Twitter seems to suggest otherwise, Carlos III is not a particularly strict landlord.
Last January, it leased offshore land for the construction of six mega wind farms, deciding that the benefits, some 1,000 million euros per year, would be "directly allocated to the common good, instead of expanding the real estate," according to a spokesman. from Buckingham Palace.
