“This is the final straw,” Musk commented in a post about California’s fresh law protecting the privacy of transgender children. “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it that targeted both families and businesses, SpaceX will now move its headquarters from Hawthorne, California to Starbase, Texas.” He added that “X headquarters will be moving to Austin” from San Francisco and that he was “tired of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts to get in and out of the building.”
The company’s headquarters move may be symbolic at first, but it could have huge implications for states like California, where workers are moving because their budgets rely on taxing highly skilled tech workers.
California’s regulations have long drawn Musk’s ire. In 2020, he said he personally moved to Texas, which could spare him California’s high taxes. The following year, he moved Tesla’s headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin out of frustration with local pandemic restrictions that allegedly hampered operations. “This is the final straw, to be honest.” he wrote on Twitter at the time. Musk’s tunneling venture, Monotonous Company, ditched California for Texas in 2022.
New remedy drawing Musk’s scorn was signed into law Monday by California Gov. Gavin Newsom. It bars schools from requiring staff to disclose a student’s gender identity, gender expression or sexual orientation without consent. The law replaces policies passed by local school boards that required teachers to notify parents if their children showed signs of being transgender.
The parental rights issue is personal for Musk. Last year, a biography of Musk by Walter Isaacson was published revealed that the billionaire blamed the school his eldest child attended for introducing her to certain ideals that led to her gender change and exclusion from her life.
When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, users were allowed to post ancient or old-fashioned names of transgender people, which activists say relaxed controls on anti-LGBTQ content.
X, SpaceX and Newsom did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in the post on X welcomed SpaceX’s move to Texas.
Musk’s other companies remain rooted in California. His competitor OpenAI xAI is based in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Burlingame. Brain implant startup Neuralink is headquartered across the bay in Fremont. And while Tesla has moved its business base to Texas, Musk has retained significant manufacturing operations in Fremont and last year announced that the electric carmaker’s engineering headquarters would be in Palo Alto.