Topline
Billionaire Elon Musk will locate Tesla’s engineering headquarters in Silicon Valley, he announced in a joint press conference Wednesday with California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), two years after Musk moved the automaker’s headquarters to Texas—and just months after Musk bought San Francisco-based Twitter.
Elon Musk, left, and California Governor Gavin Newsom at Tesla’s new global engineering and AI … [+] headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
Key Facts
Tesla’s new engineering headquarters will be located in the former headquarters of Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, California, Musk said, although he did not specify when the move would take place.
Newsom called it a “point of pride” that Tesla is once again a California company, with a manufacturing plant in the Bay Area city of Fremont, California, in addition to its headquarters.
Musk had moved the electric automaker’s corporate headquarters from Silicon Valley, where the company was launched in 2003, to a Texas Gigafactory outside Austin in 2021, bringing it closer the so-called Starbase launch site for SpaceX—the aerospace company Musk also owns—though SpaceX’s headquarters are outside Los Angeles.
Tesla shares, which had been slumping in recent months before rallying starting last month, increased 1.63% on Wednesday, to $200.58.
Forbes Valuation
We estimate Musk’s net worth to be $192.1 billion, making him the world’s second richest person, only behind French fashion entrepreneur Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
Key Background
In 2021, Musk, who owns a home in the San Francisco Bay area, said he opted to move the automaker’s headquarters to Texas for additional space and because of the significantly cheaper housing market in Austin, compared to San Francisco. Before he moved Tesla out of California, Musk had threatened to relocate both its headquarters and manufacturing out of the state in response to Covid-era gathering restrictions that temporarily closed the automaker’s factory in Fremont. Musk also announced in May, 2020 that Tesla sued Alameda County, California, alleging the Northern California county’s Covid restrictions were “contrary to the Governor, the President, our Constitutional freedoms & just plain common sense.” Musk had also criticized California in a summit in Miami last year as the “land of taxes, over-regulation and litigation.”
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Musk was moving Tesla’s headquarters back to California from Texas.
Further Reading
Tesla Posts Best-Ever Quarterly Revenue And Profit (Forbes)
Musk Testifies Saudi-Backed Offer To Take Tesla Private At $420 Per Share Was No Joke (Forbes)
Read More
Brian Bushard