Elon Musk has said he will move SpaceX and social media company X, formerly known as Twitter, headquarters out of California—after Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law banning school districts from informing parents if their children start identifying as a different gender.
The billionaire entrepreneur said the legislation was the “final straw” and announced he would move his companies to Texas.
Writing on X, Musk declared: “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.”
“I did make it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children,” he added.
In a separate post, he later said that X would relocate its headquarters to the city of Austin.
The two companies are just the latest to announce they are leaving the state, as businesses and residents react against a series of “progressive” laws, high taxes, and the breakdown of law and order in major cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Last month, Blaze Pizza, a chain with over 300 stories, announced it was exiting California—reducing its state corporate tax rate by more than a third in the process—to a new base in Georgia.
In March, a report from RedBalloon and PublicSq.’s Freedom Economy Index found that 86% of business owners in California say crime has increased in their area, while 67% said they were considering moving their headquarters out of the state.
RedBalloon CEO Andrew Crapuchettes said: “Employers we’ve been talking to have been planning a move or thinking about a move since 2020. And what’s happening is, in the last couple of years, every time Gavin Newsom does a new stupid thing, it makes it a lot easier for them to make that decision.”
Crapuchettes described the situation as a “headache.”
“They are dealing with regulation, they’re dealing with taxes, they’re dealing with crime … They’re still generating economic activity, but this invisible groundswell of businesses [are] planning on leaving the state, and that’s because of those bad policies.”
