OAN Roy Francis
12:20 PM PT – Thursday, February 23, 2023
Elon Musk announced that the Tesla headquarters will be re-establishing their global engineering headquarters back in California.
The announcement was made in a joint press conference with Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) on Wednesday. While the engineering headquarters will be moving back to California, the corporate side will still remain in Texas. The move comes just two years after the exit of the electric car maker from the state and moving to settle in Texas.
The move will bring the engineering headquarters back from Austin, Texas to Palo Alto, California where it will settle in the former home of the Hewlett Packard. Musk called the move a “poetic transition from the company that founded Silicon Valley to Tesla.”
Tesla is now returning to the center of technology and innovation in Silicon Valley, which will also place Musk closer to the headquarters of Twitter. The billionaire had bought Twitter in October 2022 as a move for him to bring what he argued was true free speech to the platform.
The move by Tesla was cheered on by Newsom who welcomed the company back to the state that “remains on the forefront of discovery and new ideas and innovation.”
“We say about our state, the future happens here first. We are America’s coming attraction,” Newsom said. “Tesla is a California company, it started here first.”
Newsom said that California had been committed to supporting electric car companies for years, proving so through certain legislative policy ad regulations within the state. The California governor had hoped that the partnership between himself and Musk would allow the state to “dominate in this space and change the way we produce and consume energy in this state, and this nation and the world we are trying to build.”
In 2021, when Tesla had moved its headquarters out of California to Texas, Musk had been in a heated public battle with Alameda County public health officials because he wanted to reopen the plant but was not allowed to.
The move to Texas seemed immensely beneficial for Musk and his company. Not only was he allowed to resume operation, but Texas has no state personal income tax, and the company would receive large tax breaks and cheaper cost of labor compared to being in California.
The billionaire did not give a specific reason to his move, but Newsom welcomed him back with open arms, saying that Musk and Tesla are a “major reason” for the state’s success in the electric vehicle industry.
