X, formerly Twitter, is set to end its 18-year residence in the Californian city of San Francisco, with the Elon Musk-owned social media platform closing its office there in the forthcoming weeks.
While no employees are reported to be at risk of losing their jobs, they will be required to move offices to San Jose – roughly 50 miles south-east of the current location.
It comes as a further blow to X staff who have previously been stopped from working remotely, and follows Musk’s decision last month to move the headquarters of his operations away from California to Austin, Texas.
‘Right Decision for Company’
Originally reported by the New York Times, news of the San Francisco office closure came from a leaked internal email sent from the company to affected employees.
Sent from X Corp’s CEO Linda Yaccarino, the email acknowledged the impact the decision would have on staff, but asserted that it was “the right one for our company in the long term”.
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In addition to the option for displaced employees to find their way to San Jose, the email also informed recipients that a new engineering-focused office in Palo Alto (also California’s Bay Area) would be used by Musk’s xAI branch.
“This is an important decision that impacts many of you, but it is the right one for our company in the long term” – Linda Yaccarino, Chief Executive Officer of X Corp
Leaving California
Although X has had its headquarters in San Francisco since it was founded as Twitter in 2006, Elon Musk took to the platform to explain that he had “No choice” in the decision:
No choice. It is impossible to operate in San Francisco if you’re processing payments.
That’s why Stripe, Block (CashApp) & others had to move.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 5, 2024
In July, the billionaire announced that X Corps’ headquarters would move from California to Austin, Texas, apparently as a response to new state legislation in the former relating the removal of requirements from schools to notify parents when children change their gender identification.
The writing was probably on the wall for the closure as long as a year ago, with reports that Musk was refusing to pay rent on the San Francisco office in June 2023.
Elon Musk and X/Twitter
Since his takeover of Twitter in 2022, Musk has continually courted controversy and made headlines regarding his running of the company – not least renaming it X in July last year.
Firings began just hours after Musk took control, as the entrepreneur sought to cut costs and assert his authority over the company. They may have been the first job terminations, but certainly weren’t the last; Musk fired staff for policing hate speech and misinformation in January last year.
In a hope to remedy ailing ad revenue, Musk has been looking at ways to better monetize the social media platform and brought in charges for new X users in certain territories.
And his constant tinkering with the platform has led many critics – including us! – to put forward that X is worse under Musk since his takeover; from verification changes and removal of news headlines from articles, to the rebrand as a whole and decision to reinstate banned accounts.
