Posted on 10/07/2021 3:35:14 PM PDT by American Number 181269513
Tesla is moving its headquarters from Palo Alto, California, to Austin, Texas, CEO Elon Musk announced at the company’s shareholder meeting on Thursday.
The meeting took place at Tesla’s vehicle assembly plant under construction outside of Austin on a property that borders the Colorado River, near the city’s airport.
However, the company plans to increase production in its California plant regardless of the headquarters move.
“To be clear we will be continuing to expand our activities in California,” Musk said. “Our intention is to increase output from Fremont and Giga Nevada by 50%. If you go to our Fremont factory it’s jammed.”
But, he added, “It’s tough for people to afford houses, and people have to come in from far away....There’s a limit to how big you can scale in the Bay Area.”
Regarding the plant underway in Austin, he noted that it would take some time to reach full production even after it’s completed.
“In Tesla-land it takes longer to build the factory than to get to high volume production once the factory is built,” Musk said. For example, Tesla’s Shanghai plant was built in 11 months, but took a year to reach high volume production. He expects Tesla’s new plant near Austin will follow Shanghai’s example.
Musk’s growing dissatisfaction with California has been apparent for some time. In April 2020, on a Tesla earnings call, Musk lashed out at California government officials calling their temporary Covid-related health orders “fascist” in an expletive-laced rant.
Later, Musk personally relocated to the Austin area from Los Angeles, where he had lived for two decades.
Doing so enabled Musk, who is also CEO of aerospace company SpaceX, to reduce his personal tax burden and be closer to a SpaceX launch site in Boca Chica, Texas.
Tesla’s board granted Musk an executive compensation package that can earn him massive stock awards based on the automaker’s market cap increases and some other financial targets. If he sells options set to expire in 2021, he could generate proceeds of more than $20 billion this year, according to InsiderScore.
California levies some of the highest personal income taxes in the country on its wealthy residents, but Texas has no personal income tax.
Tesla is not the first company to its headquarters out of California to Texas. Oracle and Hewlett Packard are among the tech giants who decided to make that move last year, for example.
Texas has been actively recruiting companies via its Texas Economic Development Act offering tax breaks to put new facilities in the state. Austin, with a top tech university and cultural events like South by Southwest, is a draw for tech employers.
Making such a move is not particularly burdensome, explained business attorney Domenic Romano, managing partner of Romano Law in New York City. A Delaware business that has operated as a “foreign” corporation with headquarters in California, like Tesla has, could relocate its domicile by establishing a facility in a new state, hiring there. and relocating key employees.
They would not have to shut down operations in other states, although they typically do pare them back.
“From a legal perspective, there’s less of a regulatory burden in Texas,” Romano said. “It’s a more business- and employer -riendly state in many ways. You have to jump through far fewer hoops in Texas or Florida as an employer than you do in California in terms of reporting requirements and more.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the Tesla CEO supported his state’s “social policies” as well. However, Elon Musk declined to weigh in on Texas’ restrictive new abortion law after Abbott made that claim.
“In general, I believe government should rarely impose its will upon the people, and, when doing so, should aspire to maximize their cumulative happiness,” Musk wrote on Twitter at that time. “That said, I would prefer to stay out of politics,” said Musk.
Tesla has generally garnered a huge amount of support from the state of California since it was founded there in 2003. It has enjoyed grant funding, tax breaks, incentives and favorable policies from the likes of the California Air Resources Board, California Energy Commission and California Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority, among others.
If he really wanted to make a statement, he wouldn’t have moved to Beijing on the Colorado. Ft. Worth, Amarillo, Tyler, Wichita Falls, Lubbock - Those would have been statements. Dallas, Houston, San Antonio are a decade behind Austin as far as leftism is concerned. Austin is just more virtue signalling.
99% of all leftists in California are from other states who moved here in the last 25 years. So when a “Californian moves to Texas” that means “A Texan is moving back to Texas”. All the most leftist people here in California are from places like Texas and New Mexico, etc. where those states just dumped their trash on California’s doorstep (along with the homeless. I have seen tons of buses with Texas license plates dumping homeless people into Los Angeles and driving away)
So this is good that the leftist filth is going back to their homestates. All the leftists leaving here is why we had so many people sign the Newsom recall, and this is why Newsom so blatantly engaged in election fraud to stay in power because he knows all those out-of-state leftists are now going back home.
Yup. The purpose of the 200,000 a monthinvasion is to turn Texas blue.
Interesting perspective, thanks.
The Californication of Texas accelerates.
Yep! Examples: Willie Brown of Texas (Mineola) and Nancy Pelosi of Baltimore. As a native-born of San Francisco, it was difficult to find co-workers who weren't from out-of-state. Many of my relatives and neighbors have fled California because of the shift left.
Yeah, I guess there’s only one Springfield in the UnitedStates too.
So when a “Californian moves to Texas” that means “A Texan is moving back to Texas.”
Close. In my 50+ years as a CA Native, it’s been my observation that departing leftists more often came from New England or Chicago; maybe Minneapolis. If they were from NM, it’d be Taos or Albuquerque. Aspen and Telluride gave us their share of bad Colorado seed. Most of the Texas leftist imports I’ve met here in CA were from Austin, and many of them weren’t TX Natives, but went there from one of the other ratholes I formerly mentioned.
That’s a good point. It’s like San Francisco with gays. You can be in Vernal, Utah, or Wheeling, West Virginia, yukking it up about the gays and lesbians and trannies in San Francisco, but 98% of ‘em are from places like... Vernal, Utah, and Wheeling, West Virginia.
The Spaniards discovered that Texas river long before any European eyes saw the other one with same name.
There are thousands of non-citizen Haitians, Mexicans, and Afghans to choose from...
that’s what I am wondering, just how big a tax hit will this cause Calif.?
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