Elon Musk’s X is leaving San Francisco
Social media company X will close its San Francisco office “in the coming weeks,” according to an internal email sent by CEO Linda Yaccarino earlier today. “This is a big decision that will impact many of you, but it is the right decision for our company in the long run,” Yaccarino wrote in an email, first reported by The New York Times.
Employees in San Francisco will reportedly be moved to new locations in the Bay Area, “including the current office in San Jose and a new engineering-focused shared space with [xAI, Musk’s AI startup] in Palo Alto,” the note said. The company’s executive team is reportedly exploring “transportation options” for employees. X did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
The official announcement comes weeks after Musk said in an X post that He has plans to move X and SpaceX headquarters to Texas.. X will move to Austin, Musk specifically said at the time. Bloomberg was reported earlier this year. that X has established a safety and trust team for X based in Austin.
While Texas is known to be more business-friendly than California—which has one of the lowest tax burdens in the United States—Musk’s public reasons for moving to Texas were more ideological than financial. He said at the time that the “last straw” was California’s new law protecting the privacy of transgender children, which he said was “an attack on both families and companies.” He also said he was “tired of having to dodge violent drug gangs just to get in and out of buildings.”
Yaccarino’s latest update makes it clear that the San Francisco office is a thorn in X’s side. And it’s a complete about-face for Musk, who tweeted a year ago that, despite his motivations to move out of San Francisco, X would not be moving its headquarters out of the city. “You only find out who your true friends are when things go bad,” he spoke poetically about x. “San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, even if others abandon you, we will always be your friends.”
The closure of the X office marks the end of an era for the company formerly known as Twitter, and for the historic Mid-Market neighborhood, which in the 2010s attracted tech upstarts like Twitter, Uber, Spotify and Square.
Twitter’s first offices were in San Francisco’s SoMa, or South of Market, neighborhood until 2011, when Mayor Ed Lee issued a controversial tax break for tech companies. The ruling eliminated the 1.5 percent payroll tax on companies moving into some Mid-Market buildings. Twitter seized the opportunity.
The company was seen as a key tenant in a densely populated neighborhood plagued by homelessness and open drug use. Suddenly, a cool, upscale food market, a Blue Bottle coffee shop, and tech workers with MacBooks and expensive sneakers dotted Market Street, along with people in various states of distress camped out in front of the still-empty storefronts.
