X kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay

All: can you please not post low-quality angry/snarky junk comments to HN threads? They're tedious and have nasty effects.

I realize this story is a cluster of divisive topics but that's why HN's guidelines say "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.

There is a famous paper about the location of company headquarters: they get as close as possible to the residence of company CEOs. If we don't consider the CEO's influence, I'm actually curious if the location of company headquarters has to do with the average age of the employees in the Bay Area. As the employees start to have families, they most likely move to the south bay for better or for worse, and I have a hard time imagine that they'd enjoy commuting via BART or Caltrain for more than an hour every day. And this is probably just me or my circles, a city's hustle and bustle becomes a distraction or at least increasing irrelevant as I age. I increasingly enjoy ample parking space, tranquil suburbs, being able to step out and start jogging in woods or huge parks, and certainly not having to deal with the craziness on SF streets. If more people are like me who prefers living outside of the city proper, then I'd imagine a company will have access to more talent by moving its headquarters to the south of SF.

Had a recruiter call with Twitter a few months ago. Mandatory in office 5 days per week. Among other things, an hour commute both ways to work was not acceptable.

Maybe they will have better luck in Santa Clara.

I don’t buy any of the flamebait reasons for leaving SF. Reason 1 is money and reason 2 is talent pool.

It’s been a while since we had sf offices, but back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes.

I’d imagine this is likely a factor in the decision.

I know for a while they were waiving some of these taxes for companies who set up offices in certain parts of the city. E.g. zendesk got a big tax break for its market street location near the tenderloin.

As for commutes, I’d be pretty curious to know how many folks who work at Twitter actually show up to their offices every day, especially in eng roles. Even with a return to office mandate I can’t imagine this not becoming more hybrid over time (of course I’ve never worked for musk or his managers — but I’d assume that if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in the office).

Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park.

I’d be curious to know:

- how folks who work at X think about this move?

- how much remote work will be allowed?

- tax savings.

- lease savings.

I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.

Doing this on a few weeks notice seems rather insane to me. Unless you have very good remote work options this is very disruptive for employees.

The issue is the San Francisco gross receipts tax, which becomes problematic for any payments company because it applies to the payments volume

Twitter is planning to become a payments platform

For all the snark from people who dislike Elon, this is a bit of a sad ending. I remember when Twitter announced their presence in mid-market and the promises of how it would help the area. What people don't realize is that his will lead to real revenue losses for the city -- the largest companies in SF are overwhelmingly tech. Twitter is in the top 5 when it comes to how much tax they pay. Loss of revenue for the city will translate to cuts.

My understanding is that that part of Market street never quite recovered from BART construction few decades back. That building was abandoned and was beautifully restored for Twitter HQ. I vividly remember it opening and then the neighborhood improving gradually. Sad for SF - the final blow to one of the few once optimistic and truly SF-based utopian social media companies…

I don't know US commutes, or US geography too well. But it seems these two locations are about 45mins-1hr drive from each other.

Where do folks actually live in those areas? Is it that a 30min drive north to San Fran becomes a 30min drive south to San Jose?

Don't you think the gross receipts tax that forced every other payments firm out of SF is also forcing X out because they are launching payments?

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1813967418383126840

Is the constant stream of flamebait (this action and other recent changes) helpful for twitter, or part of some larger strategy?

To me the service seems increasingly unreliable and unprofessional. Then again, I no longer feel like I'm the target audience. The numbers seem bad too; revenue was 22% down in 2023[1]. Also, "global active daily users of X via mobile apps had steadily declined during the year after Musk acquired the company, down 16% by September 2023"[2].

I'm puzzled.

[1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_under_Elon_Musk#Statis...

So he's not moving X to Texas? Or is this just the preliminary move?

I thought this wording was funny: "the famous Twitter sign ... [was] summarily removed" - extra-judicial signage removal! Musk is out of control.

I live a few blocks from TwitterHQ.

Mid-market is in terrible condition, worst I’ve seen it.

I’d feel super bad asking employees to navigate those streets while commuting in.

Not discussed enough about RTO is what a mess downtown is. And an emptier downtown is a seedier downtown, feeding the cycle.

Way easier to recruit/attract talent in South bay. More senior/staff level engineers. SF talent pool trends more junior, more single, less experience, etc.

Fun fact: There are 3 "south bays" in California.

1. SF Bay Area

2. Los Angeles Beach Cities

3. Orange County

I'm pretty surprised that they elected to stay in CA at all. Would have expected him to move the company to Austin.

As a UK chap, can someone give me their opinion on if San Jose is a more pleasant place to live than San Fran these days?

I’m surprised they haven’t fully jump shipped to a lower COL state.

I lived for about 12 months in telegraph hill (got lucky with a solid apartment). I had my wife and 1 year old son.

Despite it being a really nice and affluent neighborhood, there was a weekly mugging outside my house. Any packages or items left outside were basically taken if left out for more than 1 hour. My neighbor’s car parked in front of the house was stolen, taken for a joyride and left in a random part of the city.

On top of that the schools were bottom of the stack in terms of scholastic achievement compared to where i grew up (upstate ny).

Bottomline, when you have a family you don’t have the luxury of tolerating political nonsense at the cost of elevated risk. Moved out.

Only things I miss is the natural beauty and outdoors of California, and the technical community. Nothing like it elsewhere.

They say moving to existing office spaces so just saving money i guess. Lease probably due and not wanting to renew it?

I thought X/Twitter had stopped paying rent in SF.. so maybe this is related to that?

I'm puzzled by this move. The more and more I read about a business being political the less I want to support it.

I have been a long time twitter user for 15 years (some years daily and some years weekly) and I just made a threads account.

I saw a guy get shot on Mission and 6th after picking a fight with the car in front of him at the light. Lucky for him, there was an ambulance already on the block loading up a tweaked out junkie.

> Twitter — which at the time was threatening to move to Brisbane

Wow, that does not seem like it would jive with the local character for Brisbane, from what little I know of it.

Might as well just skip all the intermediate steps and move the office to Austin. Twitter will fit right in.

Does Elon still dislike/disallow remote work? Seems like that would be a competitive disadvantage.

I have always had mixed feelings about silicon valley expanding into San Francisco -- I felt there was a strong negative impact, though to some degree SF acted as a honey pot for those just interested in money.

I wonder if this will be a harbinger of a retreat or shrinking of the size of the overall "tech" sector, or if it will remain a one-off. I guess that when the blockchain and ai bubbles really burst we'll see. They have a higher concentration up there for some reason.

When did Palo Alto become South Bay? South Bay was always much further south.

I wonder if Twitter is about to be evicted for non-payment of rent.

I recently learned about Elon showing up to a Sacramento datacenter on Dec 22 2022 and personally moving server racks out of the datacenter, when his employees said it would take 6 months.

"Elon Musk moving servers himself shows his ‘maniacal sense of urgency’ at X, formerly Twitter"

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/11/elon-musk-moved-twitter-serv...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37470110

Did San Jose agree to let them use their incredibly obnoxious blinking X logo eyesore?

‘SHUT IT OFF!!’ Disruptive new ‘X’ logo removed in San Francisco:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/31/twitter...

>Construction crews dismantled the giant, blinking ‘X’ logo after 24 complaints were logged with the city

San Jose is much more permissive than San Francisco when it comes to shitty public art:

San Jose’s Quetzalcoatl: The story behind much-ridiculed poop statue:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/08/23/san-joses-quetzalcoat...

"Musk took to the social media platform to announce that X would relocate to Austin, Texas, due to his fury over a California transgender protection law." What happened with going to Texas?

I don't think Twitter realizes how much the quality of employees will crater when they trash the brand and the workplace

This is the result of prop c 2018?

The original headline says "X ...". Why was it edited to say twitter, which is not the companies name?

July 16: "Elon Musk announced that ... Twitter is moving to Austin Texas"

ref: https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=twitter+relocating+to+austin

August 7: Twitter moving to LA.

What made LA more appealing than Texas?

I mean it makes lots of sense. I'm in South Bay and the amount of vacant corporate buildings around here is ridiculous. The property prices have to be falling through the floor. Lots of companies substantially downsized their footprint during covid as they're now either partially or completely work from home places now, meaning they need a lot fewer seats in the office.

It's about time.

Consider the savings to add 15hr/wk of commute time to the onsite workforce. Yikes

> All: can you please not post low-quality angry/snarky junk comments to HN threads?

Perhaps change the inflammatory title? “kills” to “moves”

FFS.

Why is the title of the HN post changed to read "Twitter", when the linked article title states correctly "X", and is otherwise identical?

I understand this is HN and many here love SF so can you explain to me how or why a company would want to have a physical location in downtown SF? It is expensive, higher tax, more regulations, all of which are often hated by a pure capitalist corporation. With the remote work push, the argument about talent pool is moot as well.

IMO, moving out of SF is the correct choice. In fact, moving out of CA is also a correct choice, if profit is all a company is looking for.

Musk might be coaching all his moves on twitter in political terms but to me the from the looks of it twitter was extremely bloated and wasting money. And Musk is doing his best to get out ahead on the money he spend to buy it. And as far as I can tell he will get out ahead. If Trump wins the presidency again I think he might get out ahead huge

I like that. San Francisco is a dirty city with bazillions of homeless people and woke activists living in their bubble. It’s insane what happened to this once beautiful place.

Twitter was given a famously sweet deal by the city to occupy that troubled stretch of Market St. In the time I lived nearby (until the pandemic) the area never really improved. San Francisco has an odd tolerance for the tent communities, no just that it largely allows them, but that it allows them in and around the busiest and most publicly-utilized transit hubs and the city center.

IMO, San Jose has been nicer than downtown San Francisco for about 10 years.

Clever! Give a thousand+ high earners a reason to buy a car. Install Superchargers in all the best parking spots to reserve them for Teslas. Most X employees are loyal to Musk, so that is probably $50M in additional revenue for TSLA, and he gets people to show up early if they want to charge at work. /s

Yet another petty tyrant rants. In this time of cult of personality how is that newsworthy or unexpected? But this is "fortune.com", a corporate rag, so perhaps it is interesting to them.

I have to say, the anti-elon meltdown vs the elon simps is quite entertaining to watch and it goes both ways.

Why are you getting so upset, angry, emotional and screaming over someone that doesn't care about you?

Very unhealthy folks. but regardless, until the next time you will talk about Twitter / X again.

Twitter? Isn't it X now?

Good riddance. That part of San Francisco has been worse than the risky areas of most third world cities for the last 3-4 years.

I don't understand how this beautiful city was let to deteriorate so fast.

I'm probably not a favorite amog the moderators here. I don't mean to sound snarky, but if Twitters moves out of San Francisco, will the no-nudity ordinance in San Francisco get repealed? I had understood it was the influx of the tech companies that caused the fiasco thet resulted in it being passed in the first place.

Probably to do with less rent, less feces, less mentally instable people, less drugs, and also Elmo's weird thought chains.

Realistically, X is better than its ever been; community notes have been a game-changer in terms of fact-checking. Higher quality and much more balanced.