Sources: Twitter backs out from 100K square foot expansion into 1455 Market St., site of Square and Uber HQs, potentially due to hiring slowdown
EXCLUSIVE: Twitter ditches S.F. expansion plan as growth lags — Twitter Inc. abandoned plans at the 11th hour for a big expansion into Uber …
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2015 Twitter was still in expansion mode, planning to add 100K square feet at 1455 Market St., where Square and Uber were already headquartered — until a reported hiring slowdown killed the deal at the eleventh hour. The same address kept marking the cycle: two years later Uber scrapped its own planned 380K-square-foot Oakland headquarters to cut costs, and Square then leased all of that vacated Uptown Station space, with room for up to 2,000 staff.
The 2015 pullback turned out to be an early data point in a long arc rather than a one-off: Twitter closed its NY and SF offices shortly after reopening them in 2021, drew up plans in 2022 to shrink office space across San Francisco, New York, Sydney, Seoul, Tokyo and other major markets, and by 2024 some SF city officials said they were not lamenting the departure of a company bearing little resemblance to the one the city welcomed in 2012.
First-order effects
- The landlord at 1455 Market St. must re-market 100K square feet on short notice, leaving Square and Uber as the building's anchor tenants while Twitter stays at its existing footprint.
- A last-minute retreat driven by slowed hiring is a public signal that Twitter's growth engine had cooled, undercutting the expansion narrative investors and recruits had been pricing.
Second-order effects
- Extra Mid-Market supply landing back on the leasing market softens landlords' position and gives nearby tech tenants leverage to renegotiate rents or downsize, as Uber's Oakland exit showed when its sold-off space found a single taker in Square.
- With Twitter hiring more slowly, competing employers and recruiters gain room to absorb or poach from a talent pool that no longer needs a bigger office to hold.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — and the later record suggests it did — corporate real estate becomes a recurring cost lever for social platforms rather than a fixed landmark, ending in full withdrawal from the city rather than mere downsizing.
- City hall's calculus shifts too: officials who once courted flagship tech campuses express indifference at departure, weakening the political bargain that anchored tech expansion downtown.
The trend: Tech companies' San Francisco office commitments are tracking their growth cycles — signed in booms, shed in slowdowns — turning marquee headquarters deals into leading indicators of a company's trajectory.