Tech mogul Elon Musk announced Tuesday afternoon that he would move the headquarters of his social media company X and SpaceX to Texas in response to a new California law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Musk made the announcement in two tweets on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter at around 12:13 p.m. and 12:30 p.m., saying SpaceX would move its headquarters from Hawthorne to Starbase, Texas, while X would move headquarters from San Francisco to the tech hub of Austin.
“I’ve had enough of dodging gangs of violent junkies just to get in and out of the building,” Musk added in a separate post, apparently referring to the neighborhood issues surrounding the X headquarters in the Midtown area. of the Market.
Musk said the “last straw” in his decision was a new law in California that prohibits school districts from adopting policies that require schools to notify parents if their child requests to change their gender identification.
“I made it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies out of California to protect their children,” Musk wrote in another X post.
Musk’s posts did not go unnoticed. Newsom’s response was a single sentence — “You bent the knee.” — along with an image of a tweet President Trump has since tweeted about a Musk visit to the White House, in which Trump noted that he could have told Musk to get on his knees and pray “and he would have done it.”
State Sen. Scott Wiener also had a response.
“California literally made you with taxpayer subsidies and because it’s the best place around,” he said in a retweet of one of Musk’s posts. “Is this going to be a fake outrage movement, just like the fake Tesla ‘movement’ in Texas?”
Musk already moved the corporate headquarters of his electric car company Tesla to Austin from Palo Alto in 2021although the company still has a large factory in Fremont that has expanded since that move.
Musk has also previously said that he moved his private residence from California to Texas.
The announcement of X comes less than two years later Musk took the helm of the former social media platform Twitter in a $44 billion deal and fired its top executives. Musk too laid off, laid off, or otherwise lost most of its workforce including engineers, content moderators and executives charged with making rules and enforcing them.
In June 2023, Musk renamed the platform as X and added a shiny X logo to the top of the San Francisco building that houses its offices. It was removed within days after area residents complained and the city found that there was no permit for the building’s signage.