Musk is moving his businesses out of California and has been critical of San Francisco online, but city officials claim the departure of X won’t have a major impact.
Elon Musk is moving X out of its San Francisco headquarters and city officials are claiming not to care.
The billionaire announced plans earlier this month that he would take X out of California and move its headquarters to Texas. Musk said on X that he had “no choice” but to move and claimed “it is impossible to operate in San Francisco if you’re processing payments”. He has also been critical of other taxation policies in the city and California for years.
Musk may have a different motive for leaving California, however. In July he responded to posts about state legislation to support LGBT+ students and called it “the final straw”, declaring he would move SpaceX to Texas.
“Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas,” he said.
In response to the move, San Francisco officials gave The New York Times lukewarm reactions. City attorney David Chiu claimed he shares the perspective of “most San Franciscans” which is “good riddance”.
San Francisco’s chief economist Ted Egan claimed the company’s departure will have little impact due to how much it has shrunk and that “in many respects, they were already gone”. X did not respond to requests from NYT for comment.
The company formerly known as Twitter made a significant number of job cuts after Musk took over in October 2022. By January 2023, internal records seen by CNBC showed that the company’s numbers had dropped to around 1,300 full-time staff, compared to around 8,000 before Musk’s acquisition.
Since then, the rebranding of Twitter to X caused its own problems for relations in San Francisco. The company headquarters was ‘upgraded’ with a large, glowing X logo on the top of the building in 2023, but the brightness of this logo led to complaints from neighbours.
Even back then, Musk was growing critical of San Francisco and claimed it was in a “doom spiral with one company after another left or leaving”. But he also claimed that X would be different, despite getting “rich incentives” to move elsewhere.
“San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, though others forsake you, we will always be your friend,” Musk said in a post.
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Elon Musk at the UK AI Summit in 2023. Image: Rory Arnold/No 10 Downing Street via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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