Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced during an annual shareholders meeting that his company will move its headquarters from Palo Alto, California to Austin, Texas.
“We are pleased to announce that we will be moving our headquarters to Austin, Texas,” he said during the event broadcast live on October 7 from a facility in progress in the state.
However, he does not intend for the electric car maker to leave California entirely.
“However, to be clear, we will continue to expand our activities in California,” he said. “So it’s not about Tesla leaving California.”
He noted moving his company’s headquarters in May, when he announced on Twitter that Tesla would move its “headquarters and future programs” to Texas or Nevada “immediately” in defiance of California’s coronavirus public health guidelines and regulations that it said , affected production on your Fremont. installations.
“If we even keep the Fremont manufacturing business, it will be [dependent] on how Tesla will be treated in the future, “he wrote at the time.
Musk himself has relocated to Texas, where he has based his operations at SpaceX and established a Tesla factory. During Thursday’s event, he said he witnessed the Texas snowstorm in February that caused massive power outages that affected millions of homes.
He said the Tesla facility in Texas will produce batteries to store solar energy.
“I think mainly solar power will be the main source of power overall, and then you need to store that energy with stationary battery packs and then you need electric vehicles and electric planes and boats and all of that,” he said Thursday.
Her company’s entry into Texas follows a push among many businesses and advocates to leave the state to protest Governor Greg Abbott’s passage of a restrictive anti-abortion law that would ban abortions at six weeks of pregnancy. A federal judge struck down the law on October 6.
After the governor signed the bill, told CNBC that “Elon had to leave California due, in part, to social policies in California.”
In response, Musk wrote on Twitter that he believes “the government should rarely impose its will on the people and, in doing so, should aim to maximize their accumulated happiness.”
“That said, I’d rather stay out of politics,” he said.