Editor’s Note: This story was based on multiple sources, one of which intentionally misled our reporter over a series of exchanges. We have removed any portions of the story which relied upon this person and which were not otherwise corroborated.
Elon Musk intends to move the headquarters of X to Texas and some employees are worried they will have to follow if they wish to keep their jobs.
The majority of X’s staff has for years been based in San Francisco, where the company formerly known as Twitter maintained its global headquarters. With this month’s impending closure of that office, employees are being dispersed to two other Bay Area locations — a smaller office in San Jose and a shared space in Palo Alto that houses X.ai, Musk’s AI startup. Both offices are an hour or more by car from San Francisco. Some employees are being allowed to work from home despite Musk’s personal opposition to the practice, according to a person familiar with the changes.
But a much bigger move may ultimately be in the cards for some San Francisco employees.
After he acquired Twitter in 2022, Musk told employees he did not intend to move the company’s HQ to Texas. But in July the mercurial billionaire tweeted that X would move its headquarters to Austin, citing California legislation banning public schools from notifying parents about student changes to their gender identity.
There has been no formal announcement or company-wide communication about a required move to the Lone Star state, and it’s unclear how many employees may be told to relocate, and how many would agree to do so if the company moves forward with any such plan. A spokesman for X declined to comment on the record.
While the X HQ in Texas does not exist yet, most of Musk’s other companies are based or have expanded there in recent years, including SpaceX and Starlink, The Boring Co. and Tesla.
X employees are not unfamiliar with dramatic changes to their working conditions. In the early days of Musk’s Twitter takeover, the multi-billionaire required everyone at the company to sign up for an “extremely hardcore” work life or else be deemed to have resigned. Hundreds of Twitter employees declined, losing their jobs, and Musk went on to lay off thousands more. X currently employs somewhere around 500 engineers or less, one of the people told Fortune.
Word of a possible relocation order began to spread within X at the end of August, around the same time employees finally learned when exactly the San Francisco headquarters would officially close after weeks of silence from management. Although an earlier email from CEO Linda Yaccarino, who is based in New York, made no mention of Musk’s July tweet that X HQ would “move to Austin,” some employees have since been told a new X office will be located in Bastrop, Texas. Located about an hour outside of Austin, Bastrop is where Starlink and The Boring Company are now based, as well as large facilities for SpaceX. The Tesla Gigafactory is nearby, as well, and Musk is reportedly planning to build an entire town in Bastrop County. Musk also maintains a home in the Austin area.
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