Tesla officially relocates the company headquarters from Silicon Valley to Texas. CEO Elon Musk (50) announced the move on Friday night at the electric car manufacturer’s general meeting. It has already been held at the new headquarters in the city of Austin, where Tesla is building a large plant: the “Gigafactory 5”, which is to serve as the main plant for the pickup Cybertruck and the heavy truck Tesla Semi.
Until now, Tesla had its headquarters in the heart of Silicon Valley, in Palo Alto. When making the announcement, Musk pointed out, among other things, that the cost of living for employees in Texas was lower. In the Californian home of big tech companies like Apple , Google and Facebook For example, houses are expensive and many take a long commute to work.
Many employees of tech companies had also used remote work in the corona pandemic to get from the greater San Francisco area to cheaper regions in the United States to pull. But also that SAP-Competitor Oracle and the IT group HPE relocated the company headquarters from Silicon Valley to Texas last year. Big data company Palantir moved to Denver, Colorado.
Musk had already threatened to move the company headquarters to Texas last year in the dispute over the closure of the main plant in Fremont near San Francisco. He was dissatisfied with the fact that the factory was temporarily shut down due to corona restrictions and called the measures “fascist”. Musk also personally moved from Los Angeles to Austin. Musk’s space company SpaceX is building its Starbase in southern Texas.
The Tesla activities in California are to be expanded at the same time, said Musk now. Among other things, the capacity in Fremont will be increased. However, there is little free space. In addition to the factory in Texas, Tesla is also building its first European plant in Grünheide near Berlin.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott welcomed Tesla via Twitter. At the same time, it is somewhat ironic that the company is moving to a US state, of all places, where it has to sell its cars in a roundabout way. Because direct sales without a car dealership are banned in Texas – and Tesla’s business model means that customers configure the cars online.