Social media company X will close its San Francisco office “in the coming weeks,” according to an internal email sent by CEO Linda Yaccarino today. “This is a significant decision that affects many of you, but it is the right one for our company in the long term,” Yaccarino wrote in the email, first reported by The New York Times.
San Francisco employees will reportedly be relocated to new locations in the Bay Area, “including the existing office in San Jose and a new engineering-focused co-location with (xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence startup) in Palo Alto,” the note said. The company’s executive team is said to be working on “transportation options” for staff. X did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
The official announcement comes a few weeks after Musk said in a post on X that he planned to move X and SpaceX headquarters to Texas. X would move to Austin, specifically, Musk said at the time. Bloomberg It was reported earlier this year that X had already been building a trust and safety team for X based in Austin.
While Texas is known to be more business-friendly than California (it has one of the lowest tax rates in the US), Musk’s publicly stated reasoning for moving to Texas was more ideological than financial. At the time, he said the “straw that broke the camel’s back” was a new California law aimed at protecting the privacy of transgender children, which he perceived as “an attack on both families and businesses.” He also said he was “sick of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building.”
Yaccarino’s latest update suggests that the San Francisco office, specifically, is the thorn in X’s side. And it’s a sharp turnaround for Musk, who tweeted a year ago that despite incentives to move out of San Francisco, X wouldn’t be moving its headquarters out of the city. “You only know who your real friends are when things get tough.” He spoke poetically about X“Saint Francis, beautiful Saint Francis, even if others abandon you, we will always be your friends.”
The closure of Office X marks the end of an era for the company formerly known as Twitter and for the historic Mid-Market neighborhood that in the 2010s attracted burgeoning tech companies like Twitter, Uber, Spotify and Square.
Twitter’s first offices were in SoMa, San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, until 2011, when then-Mayor Ed Lee instituted a controversial tax break for tech companies. The ruling eliminated the 1.5 percent payroll tax for companies that moved into certain mid-market buildings. Twitter seized the opportunity.
The company was considered an anchor tenant in a densely populated neighborhood marked by homelessness and open drug use. Suddenly, a spacious, high-end food market, a Blue Bottle Coffee shop and tech workers with MacBooks and overpriced sneakers dotted Market Street, along with people in various states of distress camped out in front of still-empty storefronts.