Elon Musk Claims He Has ‘No Choice’ But to Quit San Francisco
The world’s richest man says he is following the lead of some other tech businesses and shutting down his flagship X office in the city.
Alain Jocard/Getty
Elon Musk has doubled down on his move to quit California by posting that he has “no choice” but to move his X head office out of San Francisco.
His post on X, formerly Twitter, came with a New York Times story reporting the flagship office was shutting down and Musk was moving the social media platform to Texas.
“No choice,” wrote Musk in an apparent dig at the city’s business taxes. “It is impossible to operate in San Francisco if you’re processing payments. That’s why Stripe, Block (CashApp) & others had to move.”
It is the latest complaint the Tesla billionaire has used to bash California and explain his reasons for quitting the state with his businesses. Earlier this month, he said he was moving X and SpaceX to Texas because of a new gender equality law aimed at LGBTQ+ children that he described as the “final straw.”
While Musk maintained last year that he planned to stay in San Francisco, which has been Twitter and now X’s home for the past 18 years, The Washington Post reported that he derided the city on X as “a derelict zombie apocalypse” and said he has had “enough of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building.”
Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion and has cut jobs while changing its name to X. Musk moved his Tesla headquarters to Texas in 2021.
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The Post quoted Ted Egan, San Francisco’s chief economist, as saying: “You never like to see a company move out of town, but it’s a much smaller company now, its future is uncertain and sometimes you have to look forward. We may have gotten the most out of it that we were ever going to get.”
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