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And bye: Elon Musk is
turning his back on California, at least privately
Photo: HANNIBAL HANSCHKE / AFP
Tesla boss
Elon Musk
(49) has relocated from California to Texas.
The entrepreneur confirmed corresponding media reports on Tuesday.
"Yes, I moved to Texas," Musk said at a conference organized by the Wall Street Journal.
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Musk founded the move with its business activities in the southern state.
His space company SpaceX is developing the "Starship" rocket in Boca Chica Village, at the planned spaceport at the southern end of Texas.
In addition, the electric car manufacturer Tesla is building a large production facility near the Texas capital Austin.
The new car factory is to build two extremely important vehicles for Tesla: the "Cybertruck" pick-up and an electric semi-trailer.
According to the Bloomberg news agency, Musk has moved the headquarters of his private Musk Foundation to Austin.
This is another sign that Musk wants to relocate to Texas, according to the Bloomberg report.
The US news broadcaster CNBC reported last week that Musk had told his friends that he was personally moving to Austin.
Income tax free in the new home
The second richest person in the world is unlikely to have bought a home.
In May of this year, Musk announced that he would sell all of his houses.
In June, he actually put his seven properties, valued at over $ 100 million, up for sale.
For Musk, the move to Texas should also be financially worthwhile, as the US state does not levy its own income and capital gains tax.
In California he has had to pay significantly higher taxes so far.
The soaring Tesla share recently made the entrepreneur the second richest man in the world.
On paper, he owns $ 155 billion, according to financial news agency Bloomberg.
Musk got into a dispute with the California authorities in May about the corona restrictions at the time, which had led to a Tesla plant being closed for several weeks.
He was already threatening to move Tesla headquarters from California to Texas or Nevada.
He describes California as "great".
The most populous and economically strongest US state has gotten too used to its success.
The San Francisco Bay Area has too much influence on the world, Musk argued further to the "Wall Street Journal".
He called California "a little complacent" and commented, "They don't win the championship anymore".
The location of the planned Tesla factory in Austin, Texas, came about at the request of his team, Musk said in an interview with "Welt".
He asked his employees where they would most like to live.
"After all, we have a critical mass of employees who need to be ready to move to where we're building a new giga factory. Austin was top of the list; so it became Austin."
Exodus from the San Francisco Bay Area
San Francisco's Silicon Valley is still home to numerous hot startups, but it threatens to lose its position as the country's leading technology hub.
Musk's dissatisfaction with California is just one example of the techies' exodus from the Valley.
In the past few decades, the cost of living, especially rents, had risen steadily in the heart of the US start-up world.
Many executives and employees of tech companies are now using the new trend towards working from home to move to cheaper areas.
Last week, the computer icon Hewlett-Packard, who once had a fundamental role in shaping Silicon Valley, announced the move of its headquarters to Houston, Texas, where the company already has its largest employment focus in the USA.
The data analysis company Palantir also moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to Denver in the state of Colorado in the summer.
While there's another trend, two of the Bay Area's largest employers, Google parent company Alphabet and Facebook, have recently rented more office space in the area.
According to the newspaper "Welt", experts estimate that more than 15,000 companies have left California in the past ten years.
Elon Musk had lived mainly in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles for around two decades.
A few days ago, he also announced that he wanted to spend more time in Germany in the future, where the European Tesla plant is being built in Grünheide near Berlin.
cs / AFP, dpa-afxp
