Elon Musk and San Francisco will be parting ways in the coming weeks and it seems neither side will be shedding a tear.
“I share the perspective that most San Franciscans have, which is good riddance,” City Attorney David Chiu told the New York Times. Chiu was a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors, which backed the tax break that lured then-Twitter to the city in 2012.
Musk is shutting down the social media company's headquarters and will move the remaining employees based there to offices in Palo Alto, about 30 minutes away, and San Jose, about 50 minutes away. X's new headquarters will be in Austin, Texas . Musk is also moving SpaceX from its headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., to Boca Chica, Texas.
Getting Twitter to call San Francisco home was once celebrated as a huge acquisition.
Not only did Twitter cement San Francisco's image as a start-up capital, but it also drew more people to the city. Its payroll grew from a couple of hundred to a few thousand very quickly. The ground floor of the building it occupied, on 1355 Market Street, became a magnet for upscale bars and restaurants where the rich and eccentric dined on elk, antelope, and pig ears.
Within five years of Twitter coming to town, 59 new companies followed suit, including Zendesk, Uber , and Square.
Luxury high-rises were erected for employees, high-end retail opened up shop, and San Francisco's national image soared.
The boom in business helped pad the city's budget but also led to spikes in housing costs, which drove families unable to keep up from the area. Homelessness also grew, which led to a whole host of other problems that the city still hasn't been able to get a handle on.
When Twitter first came to town, San Francisco's then-Mayor Ed Lee proposed a "Twitter tax break."
The deal eliminated the 1.5% payroll tax on new hires for certain companies. The plan was for those companies to create jobs and transform certain neighborhoods, like Mid-Market, that had struggled in the past. The problem was that many of the tech companies provided free food and entertainment to its employees on-campus and as a result, workers didn't go out much to support local business as city leaders had intended.
The Twitter tax break ended in 2019.
Last month, Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022, announced on his social media platform he was making the move after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), a Democrat, signed a law banning schools from notifying parents if their child starts identifying as another gender than he or she was assigned to at birth.
“This is the final straw,” Musk said. “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.”
Prior to that, Musk had been firing some warning shots at San Francisco.
He clashed publicly with state regulators over stay-at-home orders during the pandemic and, last month, claimed he had been trapped at X's garage because "a gang was doing drugs in the street and wouldn't move!"
He also aligned himself with former President Donald Trump and took a more conservative stance than stood out in the largely liberal city.
Like Chiu, Randy Shaw, director of San Francisco's Tenderloin Housing Clinic, isn't sad to see Musk go.
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"Elon Musk tweeted complaints about Mid-Market but never used his vast wealth to improve the situation," Shaw wrote . "Much of the Twitter building was vacant despite Musk’s March 2023, 2:30am request that employees return (several rounds of layoffs left far fewer employees available to return)."
Shaw said Twitter's departure "offers San Francisco a great opportunity" to seize the situation and renew focus on reviving Mid-Market and the famous Tenderloin district.
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