Musk Shuts Down X Headquarters in San Francisco

From the start, Elon Musk's relationship with San Francisco was tinged with tension, and now, it looks like he's severing ties for good. The New York Times has seen a memo from Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter that's owned by Musk, indicating the company will shutter its San Fran headquarters "over the next few weeks." The memo, sent Monday, notified staffers that they'd be relocating to X offices in San Jose, with another office dedicated to engineering also opening up in Palo Alto.

"This is an important decision that impacts many of you, but it is the right one for our company in the long term," Yaccarino noted in the memo. The upheaval isn't a total surprise: Earlier this month, Musk had indicated he'd be moving X's California headquarters to Texas, as well as the California HQ of SpaceX. Musk has noted he was doing so due to a recently signed law regarding transgender students in the Golden State. The law bars school districts from mandating that teachers notify parents if their children change how they identify gender-wise.

This time around, Musk seemed to place the blame for the move on something else entirely. "No choice," he wrote online of his decision to uproot X. "It is impossible to operate in San Francisco if you're processing payments," he added, claiming that other payment processors like Stripe and Block (CashApp) "had to move." The Times notes that X's main offices have been in San Francisco's Mid-Market neighborhood since 2012. Musk bought the company in 2022.

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Per the Washington Post, there are only about 120 employees left at X's headquarters. The paper also notes that city leaders are basically offering a collective shrug at Musk's decision. "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," says Ted Egan, the city's chief economist. "We may have gotten the most out of it that we were ever going to get." (More X.com stories.)