Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and owner of companies X and SpaceX, said he will be moving the headquarters of said companies from California to Texas. The Tesla CEO is outraged due to California's new law, which is intended to protect transgender students at school.
The bill, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA), prevents policies which force educators to tell the student's parents if the child has asked to use a different name or different pronouns.
"This is the final straw," Musk said on X a day after Newsom signed the bill. "Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.”
“The state will take away your kids in California,” Musk added in a follow-up post on X.
Musk also said he would transfer X from its art-deco headquarters in San Francisco to Austin - a threat he has made in the past after complaining of having to dodge “gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building”. The billionaire has already moved Tesla’s headquarters from Palo Alto in Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas, but his engineering headquarters is in California.
A potential move could affect thousands of employees across X and SpaceX, as Musk required employees to return to their offices following the pandemic.
It is reported that Elon Musk, 53, has 12 children with three different women, though he has only been married to one of the women whom he shares children with. The richest man in the world shares three children with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis, six with Canadian author Justine Wilson, and three with the musical artist Grimes.
Musk’s desire to break ties with the state of California may come from a personal rift between him and his own transgender child. Musk’s daughter legally changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson in 2022 and came out as trans when she was 16, but she did not tell her estranged father that she was trans.
Walter Isaacson, the author of Musk’s biography, said that Musk partially blames his daughter’s ideology on a progressive school she attended in Los Angeles.
According to Isaacson, when Musk learned of his child transitioning he became “generally sanguine” or optimistic. But his daughter cut Musk out of her life when she became a “fervent Marxist”. She also requested her name to be changed from her father’s because she “no longer live[d] with or wish[ed] to be related to [her] biological father in any way, shape or form." The source said that Musk became “pained” by the rift between him and his child.
This estranged relationship is why Musk has developed a more conservative point of view in recent years, and has adopted his “anti-woke sentiments”, the source explained. The entrepreneur has often been heard speaking of the “woke mind virus” in interviews, as well as sharing his thoughts on the matter over X.