Tesla CEO Elon Musk has announced the company will be moving its global headquarters to California just two years after Tesla fled the Golden State for Austin, Texas.
Tesla will be taking over the lease for the office space of Hewlett Packard’s former headquarters in Palo Alto, Musk said in planned remarks with California Gov. Gavin Newsom after touring the new office with staff.
“This is a poetic transition from the company that founded Silicon Valley to Tesla, and we’re very excited to make this our global engineering headquarters, in California,” Musk told reporters.
Newsom hailed the move as a huge win for California.
“You can’t rest on your laurels. You gotta step up your game, and you gotta invest in your growth engines,” Newsom said. “And I couldn’t be more proud of California’s commitment to support Tesla over the course of the last few decades.”
Newsom added that 44 manufacturing companies in the electric vehicle space are now headquartered in California, but said none of them dominate like Tesla. “And so it’s a point of pride, always has been for me, that Tesla is a California company,” Newsom said.
Musk has not always had a favorable view of California. After the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Musk fought with state authorities — whom he called “fascist” — over the reopening of Tesla’s plant in Fremont, California.
The following year, he moved the company’s headquarters to Texas, which had far more relaxed pandemic policies compared to California, as well as fewer regulations and lower taxes.
“I think California should be cautious about taxes and over regulations going too far,” Musk told CNBC in 2021. “Objectively, Tesla has done nothing but increase its footprint in California. Both in terms of manufacturing and engineering and personnel. Every year we’ve grown our headcount in California without exception.”
The announcement comes just after a California civil rights agency says it has conducted a three-year investigation, documenting hundreds of complaints from Tesla workers regarding the company’s treatment of black workers.
Shares of Tesla jumped 1.63 percent after news of the move back to California was announced.
