Elon Musk’s completion of his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter is drawing more attention to speculation over whether he might relocate the social media service's headquarters from San Francisco to Texas as he has with his other companies.
Musk is the co-founder and CEO of electric vehicle maker Tesla, which opened a $1.1 billion factory in southeast Austin, Texas, this year. He relocated Tesla's headquarters to Austin in 2021 from Palo Alto, California, and personally moved to Texas from California in 2020. Musk is also the founder of the Boring Co., which builds tunnels and underground public transportation, and moved its headquarters to Central Texas last year. Musk's space exploration company, SpaceX, is based in the Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne but has manufacturing operations and test sites in South Texas and outside Waco, Texas, between Austin and Dallas.
He is also the co-founder of Neuralink, a brain chip startup based in San Francisco that is building a campus near Tesla's headquarters and a factory in Austin. Tesla, SpaceX, the Boring Co. and Neuralink all have dozens of job openings available in Austin, according to their websites.
With those ties to Austin, Twitter relocating out of California seems "very likely" at this point, said John Boyd Jr., a real estate consultant from Florida who has experience conducting real estate searches for technology companies in Austin.
"I would be surprised if Twitter's headquarters stays in San Francisco for a number of reasons," Boyd told CoStar News. "Musk has already said there would be massive cost-cutting measures and significant layoffs. He also has a contentious relationship with California and if he wants to fundamentally rebrand Twitter, I can't think of a more direct way to do it than moving out of California."
Boyd said he suspects Central Texas and Nevada would be two strong candidates for a potential headquarters move by Twitter. He is not directly working on anything Twitter-related, he said, but is working with real estate executives who are watching the potential relocation carefully.
Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, said Twitter might even open a second headquarters in Austin and Thom Singer, CEO of the Austin Technology Council, said Musk has moved other companies to Austin so the billionaire could bring Twitter to the city, the Austin American-Statesman reported.
Twitter didn't immediately respond to a request to comment on the speculation. Musk closed the deal to buy Twitter Thursday through his company X Holdings for $54.20 per share, taking the social media platform private after months of legal wrangling and discussions between Musk and Twitter. One of Musk's first tasks was to begin dismissing some of Twitter's top executives, including its CEO and chief financial officer, according to media reports.
Musk, the world's richest person according to Forbes with a net value of more than $200 billion, is well known for his public spats with California politicians over the state’s high tax rates and unfriendly business environment.
Whether Austin becomes the new home of Twitter is purely speculative at this point and may never come to pass, but such a move could deliver another high-profile name to a city that's already attracted major outposts of well-known tech companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google and Oracle.
Social media platforms that have a presence in the Texas capital include TikTok and Snapchat. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, signed the second-largest lease in Austin's history at the end of last year, eating up nearly 600,000 square feet at Sixth and Guadalupe, a 66-story high-rise being built in downtown Austin.