‘Good Riddance’: San Francisco Leaders React to Elon Musk Moving X/Twitter HQ Out Of City

(AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

San Francisco officials reacted to news that tech giant X/Twitter will be moving headquarters out of the city under the leadership of owner Elon Musk.

For a decade, the company has called the bay area it’s home in San Francisco’s downtown neighborhood and stood as a face of the city’s tech start-up culture. However, the billionaire plans to move the last of its employees based in San Francisco to his office in Palo Alto and San Jose over a variety of disputes and complaints about the city’s business environment and politics.

Meanwhile, the company’s new headquarters will be located in Texas — the center of Musk’s aerospace and electric cars ventures. However, according to The New York Times, city officials are not sadden by X’s departure due to changes made to the company in the last few years.

“I share the perspective that most San Franciscans have, which is good riddance,” said City Attorney David Chiu. In 2012, Chiu supported the tax break that lured Twitter to set up shop in the city’s downtown.

Moreover, the city’s chief economist, Ted Egan, claimed that X’s departure from the city would have little effect because the company had shrunk so much.

“In many respects, they were already gone,” he added. The 202 Covid-19 pandemic, and Musk’s takeover of the company and subsequent layoffs reduced the headquarters to almost empty.

Via NYT:

Mr. Musk, who clashed with state regulators over pandemic stay-at-home orders and has increasingly enmeshed himself in right-wing politics, recently indicated that he was souring on San Francisco. In July, he posted online that he had been trapped in the company’s garage “because a gang was doing drugs in the street and wouldn’t move!”

Mr. Musk said last month that he would move X’s headquarters to Austin, Texas, after California passed a law that bans school districts from requiring teachers to notify parents if their children change their gender identification. He also blamed San Francisco’s gross receipts tax, which taxes local businesses for transactions that take place outside city limits.

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