Anika Begay
Social media company X will close its San Francisco headquarters “in the coming weeks,” according to an internal email from CEO Linda Yaccarino today. “This is a big decision that impacts many of you, but it’s the right one for our company long-term,” Yaccarino wrote in the email, first reported by The New York Times.
San Francisco employees will reportedly be relocated to new locations in the Bay Area, “including the existing office in San Jose and a new shared engineering-focused space with [xAI, Musk’s AI startup] in Palo Alto,” the statement reads. The company’s executive team is said to be working on “transportation options” for staff. X did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
The official announcement comes just weeks after Musk said in a blog post on X that he planned to move X and SpaceX’s headquarters to Texas. X would be moving to Austin, specifically, Musk said at the time. Bloomberg reported earlier this year that X had already hired a trust and security team for X based in Austin.
While the state of Texas is known for being more business-friendly than California (it has one of the lowest tax rates in the United States), Musk’s publicly stated motivations for moving to Texas were more ideological than financial. He said at the time that the “final straw” was a new California law aimed at protecting the privacy of transgender children, which he perceived as “an attack on both families and businesses.” He also said he had “had enough of dodging gangs of violent drug users just to get in and out of the building.”
Yaccarino’s latest update suggests that it’s the San Francisco office, in particular, that’s the thorn in X’s side. And it’s a reversal for Musk, who tweeted a year ago that despite incentives to move out of San Francisco, X wouldn’t be moving its headquarters out of the city. “It’s only when the chips are down that you know who your real friends are,” he expatiated poetically on X“San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, even if others abandon you, we will always be your friends.”
The closing of Office X marks the end of an era for the company formerly known as Twitter and for the historic Mid-Market neighborhood that attracted fast-growing tech companies like Twitter, Uber, Spotify and Square in the 2010s.
Twitter’s first offices were in SoMa, or San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, until 2011, when then-Mayor Ed Lee created a controversial tax break for tech companies. The ruling eliminated the 1.5 percent payroll tax for companies that moved into certain Mid-Market buildings. Twitter jumped at the opportunity.
The company was seen as an anchor tenant in a densely populated neighborhood marked by homelessness and open drug use. Suddenly, an airy, high-quality food market, a Blue Bottle Coffee shop, and tech workers with MacBooks and expensive sneakers dotted Market Street, along with people in various states of distress camped out in front of still-empty storefronts.
