While renaming Twitter to X would effectively mark the end of an era for the app, this would be a physical manifestation of the same.
According to X owner Elon Musk, the company now plans to move out of San Francisco in protest against changes to California law with which he disagrees.
Yesterday, Governor of California Gavin Newsom signed a law prohibiting school districts from notifying parents if their child uses different pronouns or identifies as a different gender than that indicated on their school report card. The change is intended to protect LGBTQ+ youth by countering “forced outing,” but many believe the change harms families by withholding such information from parents.
And Musk, who has had personal experience in this area with his own children, is anything but happy with the update.
In response to the announced change, Musk stated that this was “the straw that broke the camel’s back”:
“Because of this and many other laws before it that targeted both families and businesses, SpaceX will now move its headquarters from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas. And X The headquarters will be moved to Austin.”
Musk says he warned Newsom about the potential impact of such a change and also mentioned problems with gangs and “violent drug addicts” in the streets surrounding the X building that contributed to his decision.
This alone is a landmark and was for a long time the heart of the global Twitter empire.
Almost immediately after taking over the company, Musk made changes to the building: he reworked the Twitter sign, renamed conference rooms and offices, consolidated teams into smaller groups, cleared out large parts of the facility, and finally, after renaming the company, sold numerous Twitter artifacts.
Musk also had a temporary X erected on the roof of the building, but it had to be removed after complaints.
In fact, Musk's move of X's headquarters to Austin is just an extension of his ongoing efforts to transform the company formerly known as Twitter into a separate creation that will likely function better in closer proximity to Tesla's headquarters.
Still, if it happens, it would be a major upheaval, as a major technology company moves out of San Francisco and potentially loses many of its technical talent.
I mean, this really isn't a surprise. Musk has been threatening to move the company out of San Francisco all along, and it's also worth noting that he has actually done nothing on that front so far.
And maybe the additional costs and complications of an office move are still prohibitive at this point. But the desire is there, and Musk wants to drive X out of Silicon Valley, as he wants to start his own tech hub in Texas instead.
In some ways, this would mark the end of an era. But in reality, that era is long over. X is not Twitter, and what the app once was is very different from what it is today.
A physical move to Texas would also be a symbolic redesign of the new state of X.
