The headquarters relocation of X (formerly Twitter), a social media (SNS) owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, is in the final stages.
According to the New York Times (NYT) on the 25th, X plans to complete the relocation of its headquarters from San Francisco to Austin, Texas within the next few weeks.
The last employees remaining in the San Francisco headquarters will move to offices in Palo Alto and San Jose in the Silicon Valley area. This is the first time in 18 years since the company was founded in San Francisco in 2006.
The relocation of X’s headquarters has been in progress since Musk announced on his X account on the 16th of last month that he would move X’s headquarters along with his space company SpaceX.
At the time, Musk cited the ‘AB1955’ law related to LGBT students signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom as the reason for the headquarters relocation.
David Chu, the city’s legal director who supported Twitter’s tax incentives at the time, said, “I agree with the people of San Francisco,” and “(the X move) was a good decision.”
San Francisco Mayor London Breed also said she had met Musk once a few months ago and exchanged texts with him but did not ask X to stay.
The reason the city of San Francisco is not trying to stop X from moving its headquarters is because Twitter, which has changed to X, has changed its status significantly since a decade ago.
At the time, Twitter was expected to create thousands of jobs and revitalize the stagnant local economy near the city center.
In fact, Twitter became a symbol of San Francisco, growing from a few hundred employees to over 7,000.
However, since COVID-19, many employees have been working from home, and the building has become empty, and Twitter’s status has shrunk, especially since Musk acquired it in October 2022.
About two-thirds of the total employees have left the company due to layoffs and other reasons, and sales have decreased significantly, so it has not had much of a positive impact on the area.
“X is already so small that it wouldn’t be a huge deal for the city’s finances,” said Ted Egan, the city’s chief economist. “(X) has already become irrelevant in many ways.”