Billionaire Elon Musk said he is moving the headquarters of X and SpaceX out of California after governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill barring school districts from requiring teachers to notify parents if a child changes their gender identity.
“This is the final straw,” Musk said in a social-media post Tuesday afternoon. “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.”
Musk said he previously told the California governor a new law like this one would “force families and companies to leave California to protect their children.” Tesla moved its headquarters out of California to Austin, Texas in 2021.
California is the first state to pass such a law, and conservative groups have said they plan to challenge it in court. Ongoing litigation may complicate those efforts. A San Bernardino County judge already blocked one school district’s parental notification policy after the state’s attorney general sued last year.
The California Policy Center, a conservative think tank in the Golden State, said the new law “opens the door to child exploitation.”
“Gov. Newsom has okayed a bill that was based on the flawed logic that parents are dangerous and not to be trusted, and that the state or strangers are better positioned to deal with the difficulties of adolescence than parents,” said Lance Christensen, vice president of education policy and government affairs. “Hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements with victims of sex assault by public school employees is evidence that the opposite is too often true.”
A spokesman for the governor’s office told the Associated Press the law “helps keep children safe while protecting the critical role of parents.”
“It protects the child-parent relationship by preventing politicians and school staff from inappropriately intervening in family matters and attempting to control if, when, and how families have deeply personal conversations,” said Newsom spokesman Brandon Richards.
The Republican leader in the California State Assembly, James Gallagher, said the new law is “bad for families” and “doing serious damage to California’s economy.”
“With the highest unemployment rate in the nation, you’d think our governor would be doing everything possible to protect jobs,” Gallagher said in a statement. “Instead, he’s pandering to extremists in his party by cutting parents out of their kids’ education and driving even more businesses to pack up for other states.”
The social media platform and space exploration company will join a slew of other businesses that have left California in recent years. Many businesses have been pushed out by rising costs. Two months after the state raised its minimum wage, Rubio’s Coastal Grill closed a third of its locations in the state last month. Other restaurants, National Review previously reported, have laid off workers and raised menu prices since the minimum wage hike.