“I share the view of most San Francisco residents that it is good that we get rid of them,” city attorney David Chiu told the New York TimesChiu was a member of the city council that supported the tax break that attracted the then-Twitter provider to the city in 2012.
Musk is closing the social media company’s headquarters and will move the remaining employees to offices in Palo Alto, about 30 minutes away, and San Jose, about 50 minutes away. X’s new headquarters will be in Austin, Texas. Musk is also moving SpaceX from its headquarters in Hawthorne, California, to Boca Chica, Texas.
The fact that Twitter is now based in San Francisco was once celebrated as a great success.
Twitter not only cemented San Francisco’s image as a startup capital, but also attracted more people to the city. Its employee base grew very quickly from a few hundred to several thousand. The ground floor of the building it occupied at 1355 Market Street became a magnet for upscale bars and restaurants where the rich and eccentric dined on elk, antelope and pig’s ears.
Within five years of Twitter’s emergence, 59 new companies followed suit, including Zendesk, Uber and Square.
Luxurious high-rises were built for employees, first-class retailers opened, and San Francisco’s national image rose rapidly.
While the boom in the economy helped boost the city’s budget, it also led to a rise in housing costs, leaving families in the area unable to keep up. Homelessness also increased, leading to a whole host of other problems that the city still hasn’t managed to address.
When Twitter first came to town, San Francisco’s then-mayor Ed Lee proposed a “Twitter tax break.”
The agreement eliminated the 1.5% payroll tax on new hires by certain companies. The plan was for these companies to create jobs and transform certain neighborhoods, like Mid-Market, that had struggled in the past. The problem was that many of the tech companies offered free food and entertainment to their employees on campus, so employees didn’t go out as much to support local businesses as city leaders had intended.
The tax break for Twitter ended in 2019.
Last month, Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022, announced his move on his social media platform after Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) signed a law banning schools from notifying parents if their child identifies with a different gender than the one assigned at birth.
“This is the last straw,” Musk said. “Because of this law and many other laws before it that attacked both families and businesses, SpaceX will now be moving its headquarters from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.”
Musk had previously fired some warning shots in the direction of San Francisco.
He has publicly clashed with state regulators over lockdowns during the pandemic, claiming last month that he was stuck in X’s garage because “a gang on the street was doing drugs and wouldn’t move!”
In addition, he followed the line of former President Donald Trump and took a more conservative stance than was noticeable in the predominantly liberal city.
Like Chiu, Randy Shaw, director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic in San Francisco, is not sad about Musk’s departure.
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“Elon Musk tweeted complaints about mid-market but never used his enormous wealth to improve the situation,” Shaw wrote. “Much of the Twitter building remained empty, despite Musk’s urging employees to return at 2:30 a.m. in March 2023 (several rounds of layoffs left far fewer employees available to return).”
Shaw said Twitter’s departure “provides a great opportunity” for San Francisco to take advantage of the situation and refocus on revitalizing the Mid-Market and famous Tenderloin districts.
