The latest news from Tesla has centered on its attempt to raise massive amounts of cash, with the EV maker announcing this week it will seek another $5 billion in a stock offering.
But Tesla founder and chief executive Elon Musk may need to take a few days off coming up and… possibly borrow your pickup truck? That’s because, a decades-long resident of Los Angeles, Musk is making the big move from California to Texas.
Normally nobody would care about this, but in this case Musk has a reason that he’s divulged amid a very public spat with the state of California over its handling of the Coronavirus.
Back in spring, shutdown orders that stopped production at the Tesla Fremont factory led Musk to call the orders “fascist” and openly defy them. At the time he threatened to move Tesla’s headquarters from California, but reports of the prospective billion-dollar price tag might have slowed his roll on that effort.
But that wasn’t going to stop Musk from taking his personal residence, and fortune, out of the Golden State, against which he still clearly has hard feelings. Take his comments from a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, where he complained that the Bay Area held “outsized influence on the world.” Musk also likened California to a sports team that keeps on winning, suggesting they get “complacent, a little entitled and then they don’t win the championship anymore.”
Despite all the public rancor, Musk doesn’t really need to justify his move to Texas. Not only is SpaceX building its Starship in Boca Chica, but Tesla has also recently begun construction on a Gigafactory in Austin. He frequently shuttles back and forth between the two states, so it’s not exactly a stretch to set up shop there.
Oh, and one more small detail that bears acknowledging: Texas has no personal income tax, where California has the highest tax in the nation on its richest residents. This seems like it might be relevant considering a recent stock award bonanza has bumped Elon Musk up to being the world’s second richest person, after leapfrogging Bill Gates.
