It started as a piece of gossip, morphed into a rumor, and now has officially become a fact.
Elon Musk has moved to Texas from California. He made the announcement Tuesday during a virtual conference hosted by The Wall Street Journal. “For myself, yes, I have moved to Texas,” Musk said. “We’ve got the Starship development here in South Texas where I am right now. We’re hopefully going to do a launch later today. And then we’ve got big factory developments just outside of Austin for Giga Texas.”
His old home state seemed almost happy to get rid of him. His public split from Cali took root in the spring, when he had to close his Tesla car factory in the Bay Area because of COVID-19. This past summer it became clear he was getting ready to bolt, as he put many of his Los Angeles-area homes on the market. If you needed more evidence, he moved his charitable foundation to Texas too.
Musk said, “Tesla and SpaceX obviously have mass operations in California. In fact, it’s worth noting that Tesla is the last car company still manufacturing cars in California. SpaceX is the last aerospace company still doing significant manufacturing in California. There used to be over a dozen car plants in California, and California used to be the center of aerospace manufacturing. My companies are the last two left.”
His reasons for leaving are plenty. For one, there is no state income tax in Texas, as opposed to California, which has the highest marginal income tax rate in the nation, 13.3%. His pay in 2020 will come in around $600 million, and he’ll hold onto a much b share of that living in Austin.
It’s another black eye for California, and if they don’t make a point of trying to work with Musk, he might be relocating Tesla and SpaceX too.
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