The awesome Taylor Lorenz reports this on Mastadon. Highly recommend to follow her if you like these updates about what’s going on.
You need to have permits to change signs on your own building?
It’s the heavy machinery required to do it that’s the problem. This is also not Elon Musk’s building, but a building Twitter rents. The building management company were the ones who called the police.
The way I heard it elsewhere (Google should help), Twitter/Elon actually had the necessary and correct permits (for using heavy machinery on the street/sidewalk and redirecting traffic around it).
Unfortunately, that detail was not correctly communicated to building security, who called the police believing there was no permit.
By the time the misunderstanding could be cleared up, the workers & heavy machinery had… “vacated premises” already, leaving the work in its half-finished state.
Companies like this very rarely own property. They rent space from the property management companies that bought the land and constructed the buildings.
In general it’s a safe bet that if it’s an office building it’s rented space.
Most of those IT platform companies only rent their premises as it helps improve the balance sheet and quarterly results by moving “capital expenses” into “operational costs”