Elon Musk’s X Is Leaving San Francisco

August 6, 2024:

The social media company X is closing its San Francisco office “over the next few weeks,” according to an internal email sent out by CEO Linda Yaccarino earlier today. “This is an important decision that impacts many of you, but it is the right one for our company in the long term,” Yaccarino wrote in the email, first reported by The New York Times.

Employees in San Francisco reportedly will be moved to new locations in the Bay Area, “including the existing 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 said to be working on “transportation options” for staff. X did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

The official announcement comes a few weeks after Musk said in a post on X that he planned to move X and SpaceX headquarters to Texas. X would move to Austin, specifically, Musk said at the time. Bloomberg reported earlier this year that X had already been staffing up a trust and safety team for X based in Austin.

While the state of Texas is known to be more business-friendly than California—it has one of the lowest tax burdens in the US—Musk’s publicly stated reasoning for the move to Texas was more ideological than financial. He said at the time that the “final straw” was a new California law that aims to protect the privacy of transgender children, which he perceived to be “attacking both families and companies.” He also said that he’s “had enough of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building.”

The latest update from Yaccarino suggests it’s the San Francisco office, specifically, that is the thorn in X’s side. And it’s an about-face for Musk, who tweeted a year ago that, despite incentives to move out of San Francisco, X would not move its HQ out of the city. “You only know who your real friends are when the chips are down,” he waxed poetically on X. “San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, though others forsake you, we will always be your friend.”

The shuttering of the X office marks the end of an era for the company formerly known as Twitter, and for the historic Mid-Market neighborhood that in the 2010s managed to lure in burgeoning tech companies like Twitter, Uber, Spotify, and Square.

Twitter’s earliest offices were in SoMa, or the South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco, until 2011, when then mayor Ed Lee instituted a controversial tax break for tech companies. The ruling erased the 1.5 percent payroll tax for companies that moved into certain Mid-Market buildings. Twitter jumped at the opportunity.

The company was considered an anchor tenant in a densely populated neighborhood marked by homelessness and open drug use. Suddenly an airy, high-end food market, a Blue Bottle Coffee shop, and tech workers with MacBooks and overpriced sneakers dotted Market Street, alongside people in various states of distress camped out in front of still-vacant storefronts.

Source link

tags

Abkhazia Afghanistan Africa Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Canada Cape Verde Central African Republic Chad Chile China Colombia Comoros Costa Rica Croatia Cuba Curacao Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic East Timor Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Fiji Finland France French Polynesia Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Grenada Guam Guatemala Guinea Guyana Haiti Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Kosovo Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macau Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Mauritania Mauritius Mexico Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria North Korea North Macedonia Northern Cyprus Norway Oman Pakistan Palestine Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Republic of the Congo Romania Russia Rwanda Saint Lucia Samoa San Marino Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Sweden Switzerland Syria Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Togo Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Uganda UK Ukraine United Arab Emirates Uruguay USA Uzbekistan Vatican City Venezuela Vietnam Western Sahara Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe