X owner Elon Musk’s plan to move the social media platform’s headquarters out of San Francisco has sparked a desire among some city officials to bid farewell to the billionaire’s business.
“I share the view of most San Francisco residents that it is good that we get rid of them,” said city attorney David Chiu The New York Times.
The newspaper noted that San Francisco Mayor London Breed said she met with Musk “several months ago” but did not make him any offers aimed at keeping X in the city. She said, “I’m not going to beg anyone.”
The report comes after Musk announced last month that he would move the company’s headquarters to Texas in response to a new California state law that prohibits schools from notifying parents if their children want to change their gender identity.
Musk said at the time that X’s headquarters would be moved to Austin, Texas, and also announced that SpaceX would move its headquarters from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.
He called the gender identity law “the straw that broke the camel’s back” and attributed the move to “this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and businesses.”
The billionaire has been critical of policies that allow gender reassignment surgery for children, saying in a recent interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson that he was “basically duped into signing documents” so that his child, Xavier, now named Vivian Jenna Wilson, could be treated with puberty blockers.
“Basically, I lost my son. It’s called deadnaming for a reason. The reason is because your son is dead. My son Xavier is dead, killed by the woke mind virus,” Musk said. “After that, I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus.”
In early August, the Times reported that X CEO Linda Yaccarino told company employees that Bay Area workers would move to an existing office in San Jose and a new engineering-focused office in Palo Alto.
Shortly after Musk announced in July that X would move out of San Francisco, he mentioned problems with the city’s “crazy gross receipts tax” that makes it “impossible for financial companies to operate in San Francisco.”
“This is why Stripe, Block (CashApp), VISA and many others were driven out of San Francisco because ‘gross revenue’ was defined as all transactions processed by a company, even if they were NOT revenue. This meant that companies that processed payments had to either leave SF or go under,” Musk said last month. “Even if the severe crime problem in SF was solved tomorrow, X could not stay in SF and launch payments because it would fail immediately.”
The decision to move X out of San Francisco comes a year after Musk said the social media platform formerly known as Twitter would maintain its presence in the city despite receiving offers to incentivize the company he acquired for $44 billion to relocate.
Musk also said at the time that X would stay in San Francisco even though the city was facing a “vicious spiral” as companies left the city and tax revenues continued to decline.
“Many have offered X (formerly Twitter) generous incentives to move its headquarters out of San Francisco. And the city is in a downward spiral where one company after another has left or is leaving. So they expect X to move too. We will not do that,” Musk said on X last July. “You don’t know who your true friends are until the going gets tough. San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, even when others leave you, we will always be your friend.”
