While the renaming of Twitter to X was effectively the end of an era for the app, this would be a physical manifestation of the same.
According X owner Elon Musk, the company is now planning to move out of San Francisco, in protest over changes to Californian law, which he disagrees with.
Yesterday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation that will stop school districts from notifying parents if their child starts using different pronouns, or identifies as a different gender than what’s on their school record. The change is designed to protect LGBTQ+ youth, by combating “forced outing”, but many view the change as harmful to families by concealing such info from parents.
And Musk, who’s had personal experience in this area with his own children, is less than pleased with the update.
In response to the announced change, Musk declared that it’s “the final straw”:
“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. And X HQ will move to Austin.”
Musk says that he warned Newsom about the potential impacts of such a change, while he also alluded to problems with gangs and “violent drug addicts” in the streets around the X building as contributing to his decision.
Which is an iconic landmark in itself, and had long been the centerpiece of Twitter’s global empire.
Musk made changes to the building almost immediately after taking over the company, by editing the Twitter sign, renaming meeting rooms and offices, merging teams into smaller groups, and vacating large sections of the facility, and eventually, after renaming the company, selling off many Twitter artifacts.
Musk also had a makeshift X erected on the roof of the building, which had to be removed after complaints.
In effect, then, Musk shifting the X head office to Austin is just an extension of his ongoing effort to re-mold the company formerly known as Twitter into his own creation, which probably will work better in closer proximity to Tesla HQ.
But still, it’ll be a big shift, if it does go ahead, with a major tech player moving out of San Francisco, and potentially, away from a lot of tech talent.
I mean, really, it’s no surprise. Musk has been threatening to move the company out of San Fran all along, and it’s also worth noting that he hasn’t actually done anything on this front as yet.
And maybe the additional cost and complication of an office move will still prove untenable at this stage. But the desire is there, and Musk does want to get X out of Silicon Valley, as he looks to create his own tech hub in Texas instead.
So in some ways, it would mark the end of an era. But really, that era is already long gone. X is not Twitter, and what the app once was is now clearly distant from its current state.
A physical move to Texas would also be a symbolic reframing of X’s revised state.