Elon Musk is moving two more companies out of California, this time in part due to a new bill aimed at protecting the rights and safety of LGBTQ+ students.
“This is the final straw,” Musk wrote Tuesday following the passage of AB-1955. The bill, which California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law this week, says public schools don’t have to tell parents if their child comes out or expresses a different gender identity at school.
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“Policies that force students to come out without their consent deny LGBTQ+ youth and their families the opportunity to build trust and have these conversations when they are ready,” the bill’s text explains. “Students have a constitutional right to privacy regarding sensitive information about themselves, and courts have recognized young people’s right to keep their personal information private.”
But Musk, who supports Donald Trump and has repeatedly voiced his conservative politics on Twitter (now TwitterX), believes this is reason enough to move SpaceX and X to Texas.
“Because of this law and many previous laws that attack both families and businesses, SpaceX will be relocating our headquarters from Hawthorne, California to Starbase, Texas,” Musk said, adding, “I made it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that these types of laws would force families and businesses to leave California to protect their children.”
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Musk also said X would be moving its headquarters from San Francisco to Austin, claiming that “gangs of violent drug addicts” were making the building difficult to access. The New York Times reported that X employees were not aware of the decision until Musk’s tweet and were unsure how it would affect their jobs.
In a post published about four hours later, Newsom’s personal account tweeted a screenshot of a previous Truth Social post Trump had made disparagingly of Musk, in which Trump referred to SpaceX’s “rockets to nowhere” and criticized the huge government subsidies Musk has received for SpaceX and Tesla. At the end of the post, Trump said Musk “would have got on his knees and begged” if Trump had asked.
“You took a knee,” Newsom commented above the screenshot on Tuesday. “You never take a knee,” Musk retorted.
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This isn’t the first time Musk has engaged in a public diss battle: In November, he and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman traded insults over rival chatbots, with Musk calling ChatGPT “boring” and Altman suggesting Musk’s Grok AI offered nothing more than “awkward baby boomer humor.”
Musk also began the process of relocating Tesla’s legal entity from Delaware to Texas this year after a Delaware judge invalidated his “materially flawed” $56 billion compensation package (which shareholders recently reapproved). Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters from California to Texas in 2021, but Newsom’s press office has argued that Tesla has expanded its overall presence in California since the move.
Not surprisingly, Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott is ecstatic that Musk is moving his company to Texas. “X stands for location,” Abbott wrote in response to Musk’s decision. “Texas is business headquarters.”
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