The billionaire blamed a California gender identity law for moving SpaceX and X headquarters.
Elon Musk said Tuesday that he will move the headquarters of SpaceX and his social media company X from California to Texas in response to a new gender identity law signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Musk’s announcement, made via a post on X, follows his decision in 2021 to move the headquarters of the electric car company Tesla from Palo Alto, California, to Austin, Texas, in the wake of coronavirus lockdowns in the Bay Area the year before. Now, two of Musk’s other major holdings are making symbolic moves out of California: SpaceX to the company’s Starbase launch facility near Brownsville, Texas, and X to Austin.
The new gender identity law, signed by Governor Newsom, a Democrat, on Monday, bars school districts in California from requiring teachers to disclose a change in a student’s gender identification or sexual orientation to their parents without the child’s permission. Musk wrote on X that the law was the “final straw” prompting the relocation to Texas, where the billionaire executive and his companies could take advantage of lower taxes and light-touch regulations.
Earlier this year, SpaceX transferred its incorporation from Delaware to Texas after a Delaware judge invalidated his pay package at Tesla.
“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,” Musk wrote Tuesday on X.
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The first-in-the-nation law in California is a flashpoint in the struggle between conservative school boards concerned about parental rights and proponents for the privacy rights of LGBTQ people.
“I did make it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children,” wrote Musk, who on Saturday endorsed former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee in this year’s presidential election.
In a statement, Newsom’s office said the law “does not allow a student’s name or gender identity to be changed on an official school record without parental consent” and “does not take away or undermine parents’ rights.”
What does this mean for SpaceX?
Musk’s comments on X didn’t mention details about the implications of his companies’ moves to Texas. However, while Tesla’s corporate headquarters relocated to Texas in 2021, the company still produces cars in California and announced a new engineering hub in Palo Alto last year. The situation with SpaceX is likely to be similar.
Since Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he renamed it X, rewrote the network’s policies on content moderation, and laid off most of the company’s staff, reducing its workforce to around 1,500 employees. With vast manufacturing capacities, SpaceX currently has more than 13,000 employees, so a relocation for Musk’s space company would affect more people and potentially be more disruptive than one at X.
SpaceX’s current headquarters in Hawthorne, California, serves as a factory, engineering design center, and mission control for the company’s rockets and spacecraft. Relocating these facilities wouldn’t be easy, but SpaceX may not need to.
Starbase, soon to be SpaceX’s new headquarters, is the home base for the company’s next-generation Starship rocket. SpaceX builds and launches Starships and Super Heavy boosters from the remote site in South Texas, positioned on the Gulf Coast a few miles north of the US-Mexico border. Starbase is home to more than 2,000 SpaceX employees and more than 1,000 contractors.
The company says it has invested more than $3 billion in developing infrastructure at Starbase, where it has one active Starship launch pad, with a second Starship pad under construction. A couple of miles inland from the Starship launch site, SpaceX has erected numerous buildings to churn out Starships and Super Heavy boosters for test flights.
SpaceX’s current workhorse vehicles, the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, are manufactured and operated from the company’s existing headquarters in Hawthorne, near Los Angeles. SpaceX also has a significant footprint in Redmond, Washington, where it builds Starlink internet satellites, and at launch bases at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.
SpaceX intends to eventually replace the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft with the Starship vehicle, meaning the long-term future of Hawthorne as a full-scale spaceship factory was already in question. Raptor engines for the Starship program were originally built in Hawthorne, but Musk said in 2021 that SpaceX planned to build a second Raptor engine factory at its engine test site in McGregor, Texas.
SpaceX moved into its Hawthorne headquarters in 2008 before the first flight of the Falcon 9 and Dragon cargo capsule. The company is largely vertically integrated, so it has continually expanded its facilities around Hawthorne to produce things like Starlink customer dishes, engine components, and spacesuits. SpaceX is now opening a new plant in Central Texas to produce Starlink user terminals.
The first stage boosters and payload fairings for Falcon 9 rockets are reused, while SpaceX builds brand new upper stages for each Falcon 9 flight. In recent years, SpaceX has built between five and 10 new Falcon rocket boosters per year to sustain the company’s growing cadence of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches.
SpaceX is now assembling its fifth and final reusable Crew Dragon spacecraft in Hawthorne, giving the company sufficient inventory to support NASA and commercial astronaut missions until at least 2030. The unpressurized trunks for each Dragon mission are expendable, so SpaceX will continue producing those as long as Dragon is flying.
So while the relocation of SpaceX headquarters to Texas comes with legal, tax, and political implications, Musk had already bet the company’s future in Texas. It will take a long time for SpaceX to fully unspool the company’s established workforce and production capabilities in California, if it ever does.
