Finally shedding the last vestiges of the company once known — and still often referred to — as Twitter, Elon Musk is shutting the operation down for good at the Twitter Building on mid-Market Street on Friday the 13th of September.
As promised by Musk and by a leaked internal memo earlier this month, X is exiting San Francisco for good as of September 13. That's about six weeks after CEO Linda Yaccarrino vaguely said this would be happening "in a few weeks," in that memo, but sure, these things take a little time.
Whether they like it or not, the remaining thousand (?) or so employees in the SF office are being shifted to offices that Musk apparently has in San Jose and Palo Alto, though it's far from clear, according to at least one X worker SFist has talked to, whether remote work rules will be loosened, particularly for those who live in San Francisco and don't plan to move to the South Bay.
Fortune reported on the latest memo, issued today to X employees, giving the September 13 date.
Musk has said he's moving X headquarters to Austin, but that's easier said than done when you have an entire workforce based in the Bay Area. Thus there's the transition plan involving the South Bay offices.
And simply moving out of San Francisco to San Jose doesn't exactly add up to Musk making good on his claim that he was moving his companies out of California all because of a new law protecting trans youth in public schools. But that was probably just bluster on his part anyway — and yes, we know, he's basically a Trump supporter now because his trans daughter won't talk to him and "woke mind virus," blah blah. (That daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, has since gone public with her own comments that her father is speaking from a "ketamine-fueled haze," and that he's a "desperate," "pathetic," "serial adulterer.")
Musk has basically done nothing but complain about San Francisco since he got stuck in a deal to buy Twitter two years ago and take the company private — something he seemed to change his mind about doing before a court basically told him he couldn't back out. And he has been looking for a way to offload the burden of the expensive lease at 1355 Market Street pretty much since day one — starting with just stopping rent payments and making the landlord sue to collect them.
It was July 12 that we had the report that X had put the entire headquarters up for sublease, and almost exactly two months later, they will be gone.
It's not clear if X found a taker for the sublease, but word has it that there is still plenty of demand for upgraded, primo office space in SF, and AI companies are some of the biggest lease-takers right now. As the Standard reported today, via research from real estate firm JLL, "AI companies have leased more than 1.7 million square feet of office space since ChatGPT was released in late 2022."
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