By Tyler Arnold
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 18, 2024 / 17:37 pm
Elon Musk, the CEO of X and SpaceX and one of the richest men in the world, announced that he will move both multibillion-dollar companies out of California because he opposes a new law that hides information from parents about their child’s gender identity.
The law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday, prohibits school districts from adopting policies that require parental notification if a child begins to identify as a gender that is different from his or her biological sex. Under this law, schools could not prevent teachers from hiding information about a child’s social gender transition from his or her parents.
Musk, who has a son who identifies as a woman, called the legislation “the final straw” in a post on X Tuesday afternoon. The businesses will move a few states over to Texas.
“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.
Less than 20 minutes later, Musk made another post, which announced that the headquarters of X “will move to Austin.”
Musk already moved the headquarters of Tesla, another company for which he is the CEO, to Texas in 2021.
SpaceX employs about 13,000 people and X employs about 1,000 people — although not all of those employees are based in California.
“I did make it clear to Gov. Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children,” Musk added in a reply to his first post.
According to state-to-state migration numbers, Americans are disproportionately choosing other states over California.
California has suffered a net interstate migration loss every year for more than two decades, which means that the number of people moving out of California to live in another state is higher than the number of people moving to California from other states.
From 2001 through 2023, California lost more than 3.7 million more people to state-to-state migration than it gained, according to numbers tallied by the Public Policy Institute of California. There was not a single year in that time frame in which California gained more people from interstate migration than it lost. California also suffered a net population decline in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
William Swaim, the president of the conservative California Policy Center, told CNA that it’s “not just big players like Musk” leaving the state but also “entrepreneurs, retirees, and parents of school-age kids.”
“Policies like this one have pushed hundreds of businesses to leave the states for greener — or redder — pastures; places like Texas, Florida, Tennessee, seem to be the big winners,” Swaim said.
According to Swaim, a number of problems contribute to the state’s population decline.
“Under Gavin Newsom, the state has logged a number of firsts and worsts: the nation’s worst unemployment rate, its highest business and marginal-income tax rates, and massive, growing, and fatal government pension liabilities,” he said. “Suffering the nation’s highest poverty and homeless rates, its highest costs of living, housing, electricity, insurance, and gasoline, it’s also reeling from the nation’s worst-ever state budget deficit.”
Democratic lawmakers in California introduced the legislation on transgender policies after the state government feuded with local school boards that instituted parental notification policies for when children identify as transgender or request to be called by pronouns inconsistent with their biological sex. In August of last year, Attorney General Rob Bonta sued Chino Valley Unified School District over its parental notification policy.
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A group of parents have already filed a lawsuit against state government officials to block the state from enforcing its ban on parental notification policies.
Last year, Newsom signed several other bills that faced criticism from parental rights advocates. This includes a law that penalizes schools that refuse to teach LGBT content and another that forces courts to consider “gender affirmation” in child custody decisions.
