Elon Musk’s X is putting HQ in Central Texas

AUSTIN – The Dallas Morning News says Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, has found a new home for its headquarters in a city outside of Austin. The social media company — after Musk declared it was leaving California for Texas — has zeroed in on the city of Bastrop, which is roughly 30 miles east of the state capitol, according to a court filing in San Francisco. Although X has office space in Austin, it has leased the property in the smaller city to be its official headquarters and it will ultimately move its employees in the Austin office to the new Bastrop location, the filing said. Last month, X CEO Linda Yaccarino sent an email to employees announcing that X’s San Francisco office would be closing “over the next few weeks,” and those who had been working in that office would need to switch to working out of other X offices, the filing said. X has closed the California office and has taken a number of steps to officially change the address of its headquarters. It employs nearly 120 full-time employees who live and work in Texas.

“X plans to significantly grow its Texas footprint, including by opening new offices, and hiring additional X employees, following its formal headquarters change,” the filing said. Bastrop, which has a population of about 9,700 as of 2020, has positioned itself as a magnet for companies looking to expand to Texas. The city is “perfectly located in the heart of the Texas Triangle, with easy access to Austin, Houston, San Antonio and Dallas/Fort Worth’s large commercial and labor markets,” the Bastrop Economic Development Corporation said on its website. Musk has been investing in Texas. Already, electric vehicle company Tesla has shifted its headquarters to Austin from California. In July of this year, Musk posted that SpaceX, the rocket and exploration company, was moving its headquarters in the Golden State to Boca Chica, Texas, which Musk refers to as Starbase. He followed up the X post with another saying the social media company also would move to Texas. “This is the final straw,” Musk posted, linking to a separate post about a new California law that Newsom signed that prohibited mandating that teachers notify families about student gender identity changes. He said “this law and the many others that preceded it” attack both families and companies. Musk, known early on in the Silicon Valley for his work with PayPal, now sits atop the list of the world’s richest people, according to Bloomberg. Musk agreed to buy Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion, using one of the biggest leveraged buyout deals in history to take private a 16-year-old social networking platform.