Elon Musk has found a taker for at least part of the former Twitter headquarters in the former Twitter Building on mid-Market, aka the former San Francisco Mart, aka Market Square.

The vacant offices of the company formerly known as Twitter, empty since owner Elon Musk “moved out of San Francisco” and abandoned the space one year ago, is looking to be getting subleased by an AI-based software company that specializes in vehicle fleet management. Motive, a startup founded in 2013 that has been subleasing space from Yelp in SoMa, has inked a deal to sublease 40,000 square feet of the former Twitter HQ at 1355 Market, as the SF Business Times reports.

The company will be moving in in phases, beginning with 25,000 square feet.

This still represents less than 10% of the former 460,000-square-foot Twitter offices, which occupied just over half of the total square footage of the former wholesale furniture showroom complex — and included part of an adjacent building, One 10th Street, that is connected via skyway to the rear of 1355 Market.

Xitter continues to hold the lease on the massive property, after Musk made the seemingly politically motivated move to relocate the company, mostly in name only, to Austin, Texas. It’s not clear how many employees of the company are actually in Austin, while we know that a number of X employees continue to work remotely here in SF, or out of offices on the Peninsula.

Musk allegedly tried at the outset, following his acquisition of Twitter three years ago, to forgo paying rent at 1355 Market Street, as he went about gutting the company’s employee rolls. That resulted in a lawsuit from landlord Shorenstein Properties, which was settled for an undisclosed sum — possibly around $3.6 million — in March 2024.

The vacating of the building took place just about 18 months after Musk had undertaken some reportedly unpermitted and unsanctioned buildouts in the space, including a private bathroom for himself that allegedly no licensed plumber would agree to work on without a permit. Musk also had directed the installation of bunk beds in dorm-style “bedrooms” as he and engineers worked long hours during the initial rush to reshape the company and the social media platform itself.

Musk transferred the official ownership of X to his AI startup xAI earlier this year, and the platform continues to be home to the glitchy and very Musk-parroting Grok chatbot.

And, Musk is again the CEO of X, after the July resignation of Linda Yaccarino, following a two-year stint in the job.

Motive, the building’s newest tenant, markets itself as an “all-in-one fleet management and driver safety platform,” whose sofware uses artificial intelligence to track drivers’ safety performance on the road, and keep track of vehicles in a fleet for logistics purposes. As the Business Times notes, the company has been headquartered in former Yelp office space at 55 Hawthorne in SoMa, where Yelp’s lease term actually expired in July.

According to a real estate market source who spoke to the Business Times, tour traffic by seekers of office space has “finally picked up somewhat in recent months” in the mid-Market area, which has been notably quiet since 2020.

Previously: Bye, Elon!: Xitter to Exit the Twitter Building For Good on September 13

Photo via Wikimedia