When Elon Musk wants to make a point, it can often be blunt. On the day he took over Twitter last fall, he walked into the San Francisco company's headquarters carrying a sink. He tweeted "let that sink in." Get it? Twitter has gotten rid of most of its workforce, and has fallen behind on rent and contract obligations. Now it is auctioning off memorabilia, fancy office furniture and professional kitchen equipment from its San Francisco offices, where large spaces now sit empty and free meals are a relic of the past.

Microsoft is cutting 10,000 workers, almost 5% of its workforce, as it joins other tech companies in a scaling back of their pandemic-era expansions. The company said in a regulatory filing Wednesday that the layoffs were a response to "macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities." The company said it will also be making changes to its hardware portfolio and consolidating its leased office locations. The loss of employees is far less than how many Microsoft hired during the COVID-19 pandemic as it responded to a boom in demand for its workplace software and cloud computing services as people worked and studied from home.

Elon Musk was alternately depicted in a San Francisco courtroom as a liar who callously jeopardized the savings of "regular people" or a well-intentioned visionary. Those descriptions emerged Wednesday in opening statements at a trial focused on a Tesla buyout that never happened. Lawyers on opposing sides drew the starkly different portraits of Musk for the nine-person jury that will hear the three-week trial. The case is focused on two August 2018 tweets that the billionaire posted on the Twitter service that he now owns. The tweets indicated that Musk had lined up the financing to take Tesla private at a time when the automaker's stock was slumping amid production problems.