Tesla to Move Headquarters to Austin, Texas, Musk Says

wsj.com

16 pointsdcgudeman2 comments

Whenever I read news like this I can never figure out what moving a company's headquarters actually means. Musk has already been living in Texas for a while. Tesla already has sizable operations there (both offices and factories). The company is registered in Delaware, so legally this change means nothing. They aren't going to fire employees in California or force them to move (in fact Musk said that they will continue to expand their Bay Area staff). They will continue to pay (or not pay) taxes exactly the same as before. So, besides a press release what is the change exactly?

It's also funny that Tesla still can't sell their cars directly to customers in Texas.

This seems like an admission that Tesla feels there is little room left for them to grow where they are at in SoCal, similar to Amazon in Seattle, now expanding into offices abandoned by Microsoft and Expedia in Bellevue.

Austin has seen rapid price increases and a flood of development while salaries have not kept up for many of the tech companies that moved there earlier (eg: AMD and Apple). Hard to survive on $30k to $50k a year when housing prices are rapidly ascending year after year. Even Facebook Research in Redmond, WA pays their contractors much better than that, and they are notorious for the mistreatment of their contractors.

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