ATX Gets X, Coast Gets SpaceX; Move Follows Years of Musk’s Outrage About California’s Laws, Politics
Elon Musk’s Austin empire is about to grow a lot more.
The enigmatic serial entrepreneur and world’s richest man said July 16 on X that he will move X’s headquarters from San Francisco to Austin. He also said that he will move Space Exploration Technologies Corp. from Hawthorne to its Starbase in South Texas where it is developing plans to one day send humans to Mars.
It appears to be a reaction to California’s newly signed law that bans schools from notifying parents about students gender identity.
“This is the final straw,” he wrote. “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.”
It remains unclear where exactly X might plant its headquarters or how many of its employees might come along with it. It’s also unclear how many employees X currently has. In 2023, the New York Times reported the company had eliminated 80% of its 7,500 employees, which would have left it with about 1,500. The social media platform has seven open positions in Austin, although some of those job postings indicate the workers could operate remotely or from other X offices.
The move further cements Musk’s influence on the Austin area and, more broadly, the state of Texas.
“I did make it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children,” Musk wrote in another post on July 16. But there may be a lot of other factors, ranging from crime to taxes.
“Have had enough of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building,” Musk posted.
The move, announced around 2:30 p.m. CT, follows years of Musk’s outrage about California’s laws and politics that seemed to largely start with the state’s regulations aimed at curbing the spread of the Covid-19 virus early on in the pandemic in 2020. At the time, he threatened to move Tesla‘s headquarters out of California, which he later followed through on by moving Tesla’s headquarters to the Austin area in 2021.
That was followed by a flurry of local activity from Musk’s other companies. SpaceX has been expanding its operations in Bastrop County near the operations of his other company, The Boring Co., which appears to be using the site as its headquarters. His brain-chip interface company Neuralink has also been expanding here.
X, formerly known as Twitter, didn’t initially announce any plans to leave California after Musk purchased it for a reported $44 billion in 2022.
However, there was speculation that the tech magnate might move the company’s headquarters to Austin. And Gov. Greg Abbott even used Musk’s new platform to post a message at the time saying “Bring Twitter to Texas to join Tesla, SpaceX & the Boring company.”
Musk later said he was open to the idea of a second HQ for X in Austin but had no plans to move the company’s existing HQ out of California.
Earlier this year, X said it was building a “Trust and Safety Center of Excellence” in Austin, with Bloomberg reporting plans to hire 100 in-house agents focused on content moderation.
In April, the company said that Kylie McRoberts would be in charge of building out the new center, though it was unclear where in Austin that hub may be located or if McRoberts would work full-time there.
X’s California headquarters, which it set up in 2011, is about 800,000 square feet. Late last week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the company planned to sublease its San Francisco headquarters. For perspective, Google‘s new “sail tower” in downtown Austin — which it has yet to move into — has about 800,000 square feet of office space.
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Written by Brent Wistrom & Kathryn Hardison for the Austin Business Journal
