Elon Musk is closing down the main San Francisco office that Twitter, the social network he has renamed X, has occupied since 2011, and relocating its headquarters to Austin, Texas.
The billionaire confirmed the news in a post on the site, claiming he had “no choice” but to move. “It is impossible to operate in San Francisco if you’re processing payments,” he tweeted in reply to a New York Times story that broke the news. “That’s why Stripe, Block (CashApp) & others had to move.”
Musk first stated that he would be moving the headquarters out of California last month, but initially cited a new California law banning school districts from requiring staff to disclose to parents information related to a student’s sexual orientation or gender identity as his reason for leaving. For the same reason, he said, he would be moving SpaceX from its current headquarters in the Los Angeles metro area.
“This is the final straw. 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,” Musk wrote. Musk’s estranged daughter Vivian, 20, is transgender, and spoke out about her childhood in her first interview last month, calling her father “uncaring and narcissistic”.
In an email to employees obtained by the New York Times, the X chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, said Bay Area employees would be relocated to Silicon Valley, distributed between an existing office in San Jose and a new office to be built in Palo Alto and shared with another of Musk’s companies, xAI.
“This is an important decision that impacts many of you, but it is the right one for our company in the long term,” Yaccarino said in the email, according to the NYT report.
Musk has long maintained a contentious relationship with the state where he founded his companies, stating in 2022 it was the land of “taxes, overregulation and litigation”. In 2020, Musk relocated the headquarters of his electric car company, Tesla, from California to Texas in response to California’s coronavirus measures, which he called “fascist”.
X’s departure from San Francisco represents a symbolic blow to the city, where there has been an exodus of tech companies from its once busy downtown area. Since 2019, the 20 largest tech companies have slashed the amount of office space rented in downtown San Francisco in half – including Meta, Salesforce, Snap, Lyft, Block, Airbnb and PayPal. As X vacates its 74,322 sq metre (800,000 sq ft) headquarters, 46% of offices and 40% of retail spaces in the area are vacant.
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In February, X’s landlords for the San Francisco headquarters sued X for $13.6m (£10.7m) over unpaid rent on the location. A previous lawsuit over unpaid rent on the location was dismissed. The city also investigated X over reports that the company had illegally added sleeping quarters to the building for employees working long hours, but later concluded the company could keep them if it acquired a permit.
