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Social Media Corporation “This is a resolution that affects many of you, but it is the right resolution for our business in the long term,” Yaccarino wrote in the email, first reported via The New York TimesArray.
The San Francisco workers would be moved to new locations in the Bay Area, “including the existing one in San Jose and a new shared engineering-focused area with [xAI, Musk’s AI startup] in Palo Alto,” the note indicates. “Transportation options” are reportedly being run for staff X did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
The official announcement comes weeks after Musk said in an article about X that he plans to move the headquarters of X and SpaceX to Texas. X in particular would move to Austin, Musk said at the time. Bloomberg reported earlier this year that X had already built an Austin-based X security team.
While the state of Texas is known to be more business-friendly than California (it has one of the lowest tax burdens in the United States), Musk’s public reasoning for moving to Texas is more ideological than financial. He said at the time that “The straw that broke the camel’s back” was a new California law to protect the privacy of transgender children, which he saw as “an attack on both families and businesses. ” He also said that he was “tired of avoiding violent drug gangs just to get in and out. ” of the building. “
Yaccarino’s latest update suggests that it’s the San Francisco office, in particular, that’s the thorn in X’s side. And it’s a U-turn for Musk, who tweeted a year ago that, despite incentives to leave San Francisco, X would not move its headquarters outside the city. “You only know who your true friends are when they are played,” he wrote poetically in X. “San Francisco, lovely San Francisco, even if others abandon you, we will be your friends. “
The closure of Office
Twitter’s first offices were in SoMa, or San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood, until 2011, when then-Mayor Ed Lee instituted a questionable tax break for tech companies. The resolution abolished the 1. 5% payroll tax for companies that moved to the safe middle market. buildings. Twitter seized the opportunity.
The business was thought of as an anchor tenant in a densely populated community marked by homelessness and overt drug use. Suddenly, a spacious, upscale food market, a Blue Bottle cafeteria, and techies with MacBooks and expensive shoes dotted Market Street, along with other people in squalor camped out in front of still-empty storefronts.
The ultimate effects of Lee’s tax breaks and community revitalization plans are a matter of debate, and the pandemic has been an incredibly complicated factor, with reports suggesting that San Francisco’s spaces are on average more than a third empty.
The now famous Musk brought a sink to Twitter’s offices just after closing the deal to buy the platform in October 2022 and tweeted: “Let this in! After converting the company’s call to X in summer 2023 , Musk erected a giant flashing of the panel.
X was also said to have been a substandard tenant during the Musk era: its landlord, SRI Nine Market Square, filed a lawsuit against SRI Nine Market seeking to extend Twitter’s credit line to $10 million to ensure long-term rent was paid. . Other suppliers also sued X for non-payment of their invoices.
But in January of this year, SRI Nine Market pulled out of the deal, Reuters reported. We don’t know why. SRI Nine Market did not respond to a query about the existing prestige of X’s lease and whether the company would break the lease by vacating its offices in the coming weeks.
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