Top line
SpaceX founder Elon Musk said Tuesday that the aerospace company, along with X (formerly Twitter), will move its headquarters from California to Texas after California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law preventing schools from requiring their employees to notify parents if students wish to use different pronouns – which Musk said was the “final straw that broke the camel's back.”
The exterior of SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, on July 22, 2018.
AFP via Getty Images
Key data
Musk announced the company's move in a post on X, saying the reason for the move was “this and the many other laws before it that attack both families and businesses.”
Newsom signed the Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today's Youth Act (Safety Act) on Monday, which prevents a school employee from “requiring disclosure of information related to the student's sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression to another person without the student's consent.”
With this law, California becomes the first state in the U.S. to ban a policy that forces schools to out students by requiring them to notify parents if a student wants to use a different name or pronoun than the one on their birth certificate, The Mercury News reported.
In a follow-up tweet, Musk said he made it clear to Newsom “about a year ago that laws like this would force families and businesses to leave California to protect their children.”
Musk said the headquarters will move from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, a SpaceX complex and launch site near Brownsville, Texas.
X will move its headquarters from San Francisco to Austin, Musk added, saying, “I'm tired of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building.”
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Key quote
Texas Governor Greg Abbott said in a post about X that Musk's decision to move SpaceX to the state “solidifies Texas' position as a leader in space exploration.”
Main critics
Newsom responded to Musk's tweets on Tuesday night with a screenshot of an old Truth Social post by Donald Trump in which the former president criticized Musk, saying, “I could have said, 'Get on your knees and beg,' and he would have done it…” Newsom posted the screenshot and said, “You got on your knees.”
Forbes Rating
Forbes estimates that Musk had a net worth of around $254.4 billion as of Tuesday afternoon, making him the richest person in the world.
Important background
Musk's SpaceX, founded in 2002, has long been headquartered in California. Musk started the company with money he made from selling PayPal, but it struggled before winning a $1.5 billion contract from NASA in 2008, Business Insider reported. The private aerospace company designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft and was recently valued at around $210 billion in a planned sale of shares on the secondary market. Musk bought X, founded in California in 2006 as Twitter, for $44 billion in 2022 after uncertainty about whether the sale would go ahead. After buying it, Musk fired the CEO and much of the staff and set about making it more of a “super app” that could offer users a wide range of products and services on one platform.
tangent
Tesla, another Musk company, moved its headquarters from Palo Alto, California, to Austin in 2021 — although Musk announced two years later that its new engineering headquarters would be in Silicon Valley. Musk moved the electric car maker's headquarters from Silicon Valley to Texas to bring it closer to the Starbase launch site. As of 4:15 p.m. EDT Tuesday, Musk had not yet tweeted that Tesla's engineering headquarters would be moving.
Further information
