A Colorado appeals court has thrown out a 10 million dollar verdict against X Corp., ruling that a Boulder judge misinterpreted the company's former lease there. The Colorado Court of Appeals reversed the judgment on Thursday, October 22, in a unanimous decision by a three-judge panel, and the case now returns to Boulder.
"It is not for us to decide what is the better business deal," Judge Karl Schock wrote for the panel. "Rather, because the lease does not yield an absurd result, we must enforce the bargain the parties struck." That sentence captures the heart of the ruling: the appeals court said the written lease, not a judge's view of a fairer outcome, controls what the parties owe each other.
The dispute goes back to 2020, when the company then known as Twitter Inc. agreed to lease 64,000 square feet from The John Buck Co. in the Railyards at S'PARK office building, which was under construction at 3401 Bluff St. in Boulder. X Corp. then spent about 20 million dollars building out its office space there, according to BusinessDen, which reported the reversal on Friday.
At the center of the fight was a tenant improvement allowance of nearly 5.8 million dollars. Law360 reported that the appeals panel found the lower court incorrectly interpreted a contract provision outlining how that allowance was to be distributed. In the earlier proceedings, Boulder judge Nancy Salomone ruled that Twitter had broken its 10-year lease. She ordered the company to pay 8.3 million dollars, plus 1.7 million dollars in attorney fees for Buck Co., bringing the total to about 10 million dollars.
The background, as reported when X appealed that verdict, is a familiar post-acquisition story. Twitter stopped paying rent in late 2022, after Elon Musk's purchase of the company, was evicted, sued its landlord for wrongful eviction, and was sued in return for back rent. X's lawyers called the original verdict "deeply flawed" and argued the court had deprived Twitter of negotiated rights, including millions of dollars in rent credits. Thursday's reversal is a loss for The John Buck Co., the Chicago company that owns the Railyards building.
For people who follow X as users, the case changes nothing about the app itself. There is no new feature, policy, or price attached to it. What it does show is how much of the old Twitter's physical footprint is still being sorted out in court, years after the company became X. Offices were signed on long leases, built out at considerable cost, and then left behind as the company shrank and changed direction, and judges are still working through who pays for what.
The reversal does not end the matter outright. Because the case returns to Boulder, the underlying lease dispute will be considered again under the appeals court's reading of the allowance provision. Until that next step plays out, the 10 million dollar verdict that stood against X no longer stands, and the landlord that won it at trial will have to argue its case again on a narrower, and now appellate-defined, reading of the lease the two sides signed in 2020.