Elon Musk said he is moving more of his business empire to Texas. Musk-led Companies X and SpaceX will move their corporate headquarters to the Lone Star State from California, he wrote in a statement. a post in X He did not specify a timeline for the move on Tuesday, but was clear about his reasons.
“This is the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Musk said in a post about a new California law protecting the privacy of transgender children. “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, which attacked both families and businesses, SpaceX will now be moving its headquarters from Hawthorne, California to Starbase, Texas.” He went on to say that “X’s headquarters will be moving to Austin” from San Francisco and that he is “sick and tired of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building.”
Headquarters moves may start out as symbolic, but they can have huge implications for states like California if staff are relocated, since their budgets rely on taxes on high-level tech workers.
California rules have long drawn Musk’s ire. In 2020, he said he had personally relocated to Texas, a move that could spare him high California taxes. The following year, he moved Tesla’s headquarters to Austin from Silicon Valley because of frustrations over local pandemic restrictions that allegedly hampered operations. “Frankly, this is the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said. He tweeted At that time, Musk’s tunnel-digging operation, the Boring Company, left California for Texas in 2022.
The new measure California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law into law on Monday that drew scorn from Musk. It prohibits schools from requiring employees to disclose a student’s gender identity, gender expression or sexual orientation without the student’s permission. The law overrides policies passed by local school boards that required educators to inform parents if their children showed signs of being transgender.
“I made it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and businesses to leave California to protect their children,” Musk wrote in his series of posts on Tuesday.
The issue of parental rights is personal to Musk. Last year, Walter Isaacson published a biography of Musk. revealed that the billionaire blamed his eldest daughter’s school for exposing her to certain ideals that led her to become a woman and exclude him from her life.
After Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he began allowing users to post transgender people’s former names, or deadnames, which activists say has made it easier to police anti-LGBTQ content.
X, SpaceX and Newsom did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in a post on X applauded SpaceX’s move to Texas.
Musk’s other companies still have roots in California. OpenAI rival xAI is based in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Burlingame. Brain implant startup Neuralink is across the bay in Fremont. And while Tesla has moved its business base to Texas, Musk has maintained significant manufacturing operations in Fremont and last year announced an engineering headquarters for the electric carmaker in Palo Alto.