Elon Musk said he’s moving more of his business empire to Texas. Musk-run X and SpaceX will relocate their headquarters from California to the Lonestar State, he wrote in a post on X on Tuesday. He didn’t give a timeline for the move, but he was clear about his reasoning.
“This is the last straw,” Musk responded to a post about a new California law protecting the privacy of transgender children. “Because of this law and the many others that came before it, attacking families and businesses alike, SpaceX will now be moving its headquarters from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.” He added that “X HQ will be moving from San Francisco to Austin” and that he’s “tired of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building.”
While a headquarters move may seem symbolic at first, it can have major implications for states like California, whose budgets depend on taxing highly skilled tech workers, if they relocate.
California’s rules have long angered Musk. In 2020, he said he had personally relocated to Texas, a move that would spare him California’s high taxes. The following year, he moved Tesla’s headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin amid frustrations over local pandemic restrictions that would hamper operations. “Honestly, this is the last straw,” he tweeted at the time. Musk’s tunneling company, the Boring Company, left California for Texas in 2022.
The new measure that drew Musk’s scorn was signed into law by California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday. It prohibits schools from requiring staff to disclose a student’s gender identity, gender expression or sexual orientation without the student’s consent. The law overrides local school board policies that required teachers to tell 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 messages on Tuesday.
The issue of parental rights is personal for Musk. Last year, a biography of Musk by Walter Isaacson revealed that the billionaire blamed his eldest child’s school for exposing her to certain ideals that led her to become a woman and cutting him out of her life.
After Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he began allowing users to post the former names of transgender people, or dead names. Activists say he has also become less strict about cracking down on anti-LGBTQ content.
X, SpaceX and Newsom did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott applauded SpaceX's move to Texas in a message on X.
Other Musk companies remain rooted in California. His OpenAI challenger 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 corporate base to Texas, Musk has kept significant manufacturing operations in Fremont and last year announced an engineering headquarters for the electric carmaker in Palo Alto.
