Social media company X is closing its San Francisco office “within weeks,” according to an internal email CEO Linda Yaccarino sent earlier today. “This is a significant decision that will impact many of you, but it is the right decision for our company in the long run,” Yaccarino wrote in the email, which was first reported by The New York Times.
Employees in San Francisco will reportedly be relocated to new locations in the Bay Area, “including the existing San Jose office and a new tech-focused shared space with [xAI, Musk’s AI startup] in Palo Alto,” the memo said. The company’s management team is reportedly working on “transportation options” for employees. 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’s headquarters to Texas. X would specifically move to Austin, Musk said at the time. Bloomberg reported earlier this year that X had already assembled a trust and security team for X, based in Austin.
Although the state of Texas is known for being more business-friendly than California (it has one of the lowest tax rates in the U.S.), Musk's public reasoning for moving to Texas was more ideological than financial. He said at the time that the “last straw” was a new California law protecting the privacy of transgender children, which he said was “attacking both families and businesses.” He also said that he was “tired 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 in particular is a thorn in X's side. And it's a turnaround for Musk, who tweeted a year ago that despite incentives to leave San Francisco, X would not be moving its headquarters out of the city. “You don't know who your real friends are until push comes to shove,” he waxed poetic about X“San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, even if others leave you, we will always be your friend.”
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 that helped attract emerging tech companies like Twitter, Uber, Spotify and Square in the 2010s.
Twitter’s first offices were in SoMa, or San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, until 2011, when then-Mayor Ed Lee passed a controversial tax cut for tech companies. The ruling eliminated the 1.5 percent payroll tax for companies that moved into certain Mid-Market buildings. Twitter jumped at the chance.
The business was seen as an anchor tenant in a densely populated neighborhood marked by homelessness and open drug use. Suddenly, there was an airy, upscale food market, a Blue Bottle Coffee shop, and tech workers with MacBooks and overpriced sneakers strewn across Market Street, along with people in various states of distress camped out in front of still-empty storefronts.
