Elon Musk’s X to close former HQ office in SF’s Mid-Market

Elon Musk’s X will close its office in San Francisco after announcing it would move its hub to Texas.

Over the next few weeks, the social media firm plans to shut down its 463,000-square-foot former headquarters at 1355 Market Street, in Mid-Market, the New York Times and San Francisco Business Journal reported, citing an internal email.

Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, emailed employees Monday to say the company would move from San Francisco to existing offices in San Jose. It will also open an engineering office in Palo Alto that it will share with xAI, an artificial intelligence startup also controlled by Musk. 

“This is an important decision that impacts many of you, but it is the right one for our company in the long term,” Yaccarino wrote to employees.

The move comes after Musk announced last month he would move the company’s headquarters to Austin, Texas, after California passed a law that bans school districts from requiring teachers to notify parents if their children change their gender identification.

Musk said that such legislation would “force families and companies to leave California to protect their children.”

“No choice,” Musk wrote on X  as news of the pending closure broke. “It is impossible to operate in San Francisco if you’re processing payments.”

X has worked to establish a Venmo-like payment feature, which Musk wants to turn into an “everything app.” As of last year, the company had secured approvals to engage in money transfers in a dozen states.

The social media company once known as Twitter was founded in San Francisco in 2006. It moved its headquarters to Mid-Market in 2012 after striking a deal with local legislators for a payroll tax break.

Since Musk bought Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion, the company has skipped rent payments to its landlord, Shorenstein Properties, based in San Francisco. X also tried to cut costs by turning some of the space into bedrooms for traveling employees. With no janitors cleaning and restocking bathrooms, workers once had to bring their own toilet paper. 

Last month, X put its 800,000-square-foot headquarters up for sublease at 1355 Market Street and 1 Tenth Street. The listing includes 463,000 square feet of offices at the 87-year-old Art Deco building known as Market Square and an attached 330,000-square-foot building at 1 Tenth Street the firm previously put up for sublease.

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“Have had enough of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building,” Musk wrote in a subsequent post on X of the street conditions in Mid-Market, which have worsened since the pandemic. 

The CEO of Tesla moved his EV automaker’s corporate headquarters in Palo Alto to Austin in 2021 after deciding to live in the Lone Star State.

— Dana Bartholomew