Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter the question has come up about if the Twitter HQ will remain in downtown San Francisco or if it will be moved to Texas where his other companies are based.
In a now deleted Tweet before Musk purchased Twitter he suggested turning the San Francisco HQ into a homeless shelter in a poll 91% responded “Yes” in the now deleted poll. Musk later responded saying he was serious about the proposition.
Today a ranch owner in Texas offered Musk 100 acres of free land in Shcwertner, Texas, about 38 miles north of Austin, where Tesla’s operations are based.
Governor Greg Abbott even proposed renaming the small town to “Twitter, Texas”
With Elon Musk now being the owner of Twitter I see no reason that this wouldn’t happen. Obviously Elon would want to make Twitter a profiting company and cutting costs which this would of course do, Twitter’s tax break on their San Francisco building expired in 2019.
However, I also see this as an opportunity to filter out employees, Elon’s free speech goal may not be achieved without getting rid of a huge amount of staff in all levels of Twitter. Moving to Texas may just be the start of that. Not only because Texas is conservative, which obviously is a negative for most Twitter employees, but naturally most will not move and leave family/friends in California just for a Twitter job.
Also, let’s be honest Elon wants to have control over his company, he’s a boss and he wants to act like it, hell he even put a house at the SpaceX base in Boca Chica, Texas after selling all of his other properties.
So I think moving Twitter operations to Texas makes it easier for him to have control over the company which I do think he wants. He has a goal of free speech and I doubt a man like him is going to give up until he achieves that goal.
We shall see.