Elon Musk announced on Tuesday that he will be moving the headquarters of his company, SpaceX, from California to Texas.
In a Twitter/X post, Musk cited California’s new ban on mandatory transgender notification in schools as one of the reasons for his move, calling it a “final blow” and saying such a bill would be “[attack] “Both families and businesses”
“This is the final push: Due to this law and many previous laws that attack both families and businesses, SpaceX will be relocating our headquarters from Hawthorne, CA to Starbase, TX,” Musk wrote. Hawthorne is a suburb of the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
He later added, “And X headquarters will move to Austin… Many other companies will follow.”
The bill, signed into law by California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday, bans school policies that require parents to be notified if their child wants to change their pronouns or identifies as transgender. The law comes after several school districts across the state have introduced such rules.
“In California the state will take your children away,” Musk added in a subsequent post on X.
Musk has been criticized in the past for inflammatory remarks about transgender people, including about his daughter, who he claimed in court documents: “I no longer live with my biological father and have no desire to be in any way related to him.” Her daughter has legally changed her name and gender. Musk’s biographer said the CEO blamed her art school for changing her political views to “full-on communism.”
Musk had previously said he would “aggressively lobby to criminalize” gender-affirming care for transgender youth at Twitter. A 2023 report from the Center for Combating Digital Hate (CCDH) found that tweets accusing people in the LGBTQ+ community of “raising children for sexual abuse” have increased 119% since Musk bought Twitter in 2022. Musk later sued CCDH over the report, claiming its “misleading claims” alienated advertisers. The lawsuit was filed Thrown out 2024.
In 2023, Musk quietly rolled back X’s rules that protected users from being misgendered or deadnamed. These policies were: Resurrected again 2024.
The move of Musk’s headquarters will affect thousands of employees at both Corp. and SpaceX, as both companies require employees to work from offices. Musk has ordered nearly all employees to return to the office and be “very hardcore” after he acquires X in 2022. Earlier this month, Twitter began seeking subleases for its 800,000-square-foot office in downtown San Francisco.
Musk announced in February that he was moving SpaceX’s incorporation from Delaware to Texas after a Delaware court invalidated his $56 billion compensation package from electric-car maker Tesla Inc. Shareholders voted in late June to uphold the package.
Reuters contributed to this report.
