Elon Musk will close the headquarters of its social media company in the coming weeks and move its last employees based there to offices in the south. Palo Alto and Saint Joseph, CaliforniaThe new headquarters will be located in Texas.
But city officials don’t regret the departure. X bears little resemblance to the company that San Francisco lured with a tax break more than a decade ago, when it was Twitterto help consolidate a budding tech hub in a downtown neighborhood known as Mid-Market. The pandemic and Musk’s 2022 acquisition of the company and subsequent elimination of its workforce reduced the headquarters to a ghost town.
“I share the view that most San Franciscans have, which is that it’s better not to do it,” said City Attorney David Chiu, who as a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors backed the tax break that brought Twitter into the mid-market in 2012.
Musk and X did not respond to requests for comment.
In October 2022, Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and promptly cut jobs. Last year, he changed the company’s name and put a giant “X” sign on the roof that flashed at night, disturbing neighbors and getting him into trouble with the city.
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“It’s like a zombie version of the old Twitter, and I think what a lot of people are feeling is: Enough of putting this bird out of its misery,” said Yao Yue, a software engineer who worked at Twitter for 12 years and was fired after Musk’s acquisition. Musk said last month that he would move Twitter’s headquarters to Austin, Texas, after California passed a law banning school districts from requiring teachers to notify parents if their children change their gender identification. He also blamed San Francisco’s gross receipts tax, which taxes local businesses on transactions that take place outside city limits.
He said the tax unfairly penalizes companies that process payments, something he hopes X will do. “X couldn’t stay in SF and launch payments as it would fail immediately,” he posted in July.
Mayor London Breed said she had met with Musk once several months ago and had exchanged text messages with him. She said she had not offered X anything to stay, but that she wanted to maintain good relations with all of her city’s CEOs.
“I’m not going to beg anybody,” Breed said.
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