Call it LL Cool J because Tesla is going back to Cali.
Elon Musk announced plans for the electric car manufacturer to relocate its engineering headquarters to a former Hewlett-Packard site in Palo Alto, the Dallas Morning News reported. Musk shared the news in a joint press conference with California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“This is a poetic transition from the company that founded Silicon Valley to Tesla,” Musk said.
The decision comes less than three years after Musk denounced California’s high taxes and “sour business climate,” and said he was moving the company and himself to Texas, which has no corporate or personal state income tax.
At the time Musk said he wanted the Tesla headquarters to be closer to one of its factories in Austin as well as a SpaceX complex.
“If a team is winning for too long, they tend to get complacent,” Musk told the outlet in December 2020. “California has been winning for a long time, and I think they’re taking it for granted.”
Meanwhile Tesla has retained a large footprint in California, where it has more than 47,000 employees. The headquarters will add to Tesla’s hardware and software engineering facility in Palo Alto, its auto plant in Fremont, its development and testing facility in San Diego and its Megapack production facility in Lathrop.
Tesla will stay in Texas, too. In December, the company announced plans to finish out the interior of its manufacturing facility near Austin with a $58 million expansion. In addition, last month, the electric vehicle manufacturer signed a lease for more than 1 million square feet in the building at 111 Empire Boulevard in Brookshire near Houston.
— Victoria Pruitt
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