SpaceX founder Elon Musk said Tuesday the aerospace company, along with X, formerly known as Twitter, will move their headquarters from California to Texas after California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law preventing schools from requiring employees to notify parents if students request to use different pronouns—which Musk said was the “final straw.”
SpaceX founder Elon Musk said Tuesday the aerospace company, along with X, formerly known as Twitter, will move their headquarters from California to Texas
Key Takeaways
- Musk announced the company would be moving in a post on X, saying the move is “because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies.”
- Newsom signed the Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth Act, or SAFETY Act—which prevents a school employee from being required “to disclose any information related to a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil’s consent”—on Monday.
- The law makes California the first state in the U.S. to ban policies that force schools to out students by requiring they notify parents if a student wants to use a name or pronoun other than what’s on their birth certificate, The Mercury News reported.
- In a follow up tweet, Musk said he made it clear to Newsom “about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children.”
- Musk said the headquarters will be moved out of Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, a SpaceX complex and launch site near Brownsville, Texas.
- X will move its headquarters from San Francisco to Austin, Musk added, saying: “Have had enough of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building.”
Crucial Quote
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a post on X Musk’s decision to move SpaceX to the state “cements Texas as the leader in space exploration.”
What To Watch For
Whether Newsom responds. Forbes has reached out to the governor’s office for comment on Musk’s decision.
Forbes Valuation
Forbes estimates Musk has a net worth of about $254.4 billion as of Tuesday afternoon, making him the wealthiest person in the world.
Key Background
Musk’s SpaceX, which he founded in 2002, has long been headquartered in California. Musk founded the company with the money he made from selling PayPal, though it struggled before it received a $1.5 billion contract from NASA in 2008, Business Insider reported. The private aerospace company designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft, and it was recently reportedly valued around $210 billion in a planned secondary market share sale. Musk purchased X, which was founded in 2006 in California as Twitter, in 2022 for $44 billion after uncertainty about whether the sale would happen. After Musk bought it, he fired the CEO and much of the staff and got to work on making it more of a “super app” that could provide users with a wide range of products and services on one platform.
Tangent
Tesla, another of Musk’s businesses, moved its headquarters from Palo Alto, California to Austin in 2021—though Musk announced two years later its new engineering headquarters would be in Silicon Valley. Musk moved the electric automaker’s corporate headquarters from Silicon Valley to Texas to bring it closer to the Starbase launch site. As of 4:15 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, Musk had not tweeted that the Tesla engineering headquarters would be moving.
This article was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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