Social media company X is closing its San Francisco office “over the next few weeks,” according to an internal email sent by CEO Linda Yaccarino earlier today. “This is a big decision that impacts many of you, but it’s the right thing for our company long-term,” Yaccarino wrote in an email, first reported The New York Times reports.
Employees in San Francisco will reportedly be relocated to recent locations in the Bay Area, “including an existing office in San Jose and a new shared space focused on engineering.” [xAI, Musk’s AI startup] in Palo Alto,” the memo reads. The company’s leadership team is reportedly working on “transportation options” for employees. X did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
The official announcement comes weeks after Musk said in a post on X that he planned to move the headquarters of X and SpaceX to Texas. X would move specifically to Austin, Musk said at the time. Bloomberg reported earlier this year that X has already staffed the X Trust and Safety team in Austin.
While Texas is known to be more business-friendly than California — it has one of the lowest tax burdens in the U.S. — Musk’s publicly stated reasoning for moving to Texas was more ideological than financial. He said at the time that the “final straw” was California’s recent privacy law for transgender children, which he said “attacks both families and businesses.” He also said he was “sick of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of my building.”
The latest from Yaccarino suggests that the San Francisco office, specifically, is a thorn in X’s side. And that’s a 180-degree turn for Musk, who tweeted a year ago that despite encouragement to move out of San Francisco, X wouldn’t move its headquarters out of the city. “You only find out who your real friends are when things are bad.” he waxed poetically about X“San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, though others leave you, we will always be your friends.”
The closing of Office X marks the end of an era for the company formerly known as Twitter and for the historic Mid-Market neighborhood, which in the 2010s attracted emerging tech companies like Twitter, Uber, Spotify and Square.
Twitter’s earliest offices were in SoMa, or the South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco, until 2011, when then-Mayor Ed Lee introduced a controversial tax break for tech companies. The ruling eliminated a 1.5 percent payroll tax for companies that moved into certain Mid-Market buildings. Twitter jumped at the chance.
The company was considered a major tenant in a densely populated neighborhood rife with homelessness and open drug apply. Suddenly, Market Street was home to a expansive, upscale food market, a Blue Bottle Coffee, and tech workers with MacBooks and high-priced sneakers, as well as people in various states of despair, camped out in front of still-empty storefronts.