Golden No More: Tesla to Move Headquarters from California to Texas
By Edward A. Sanchez – Oct. 8, 2021
At Tesla’s quarterly investor’s meeting this week, held at the still under-construction Gigafactory Texas near Austin, Tesla boss Elon Musk confirmed what many had speculated, and that the company itself even insinuated by changing the dateline on an investor’s news release from “Palo Alto, Calif.” to “Austin, Tex.” Tesla is moving its corporate headquarters from California to Texas. No firm timeline for the transition was announced, but the move seemed pretty definitive.
Musk clarified that the move did not mean Tesla was pulling up stakes from the Golden State entirely. He said the Fremont plant would receive additional investments and expansion, and that construction was moving forward on a battery “Megafactory” in Lathrop, Calif., east of Fremont, near the city of Tracy.
I try to refrain from getting overly partisan in my posts, preferring to stay relatively objective and focused on EV news and technological developments. However, I am going to take some editorial liberty here.
I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. The region has been a hotbed of liberal politics and activism for decades. Although my politics have moderated over the years from the firebrand, reactionary conservatism of my youth, the Bay Area’s politics, by-and-large, are still well to the left of the mainstream, and my own.
Tesla’s headquarters might be packing up and leaving California, but the move is largely symbolic, with Tesla still retaining a large footprint in the Golden State.
Social policies aside, liberal politics typically brings with it a belief in activist government, protection of non-executive employees through policies friendly to unions and collective bargaining, and a paternalistic view of government in general, with the belief that it is the state’s responsibility to provide a basic social safety net, social services, and assure none “fall through the cracks.” That’s all well and good, but when this kind of philosophy goes on unfettered, as it has in California, which has had a Democratic majority in the state assembly for more than 50 years now, it can lead to a number of unintended consequences.
One of those consequences is the increasingly burdensome toll of taxes and punitive measures against businesses in the name of “fairness” and “social justice.” When this is approached with an anti-business dogmatic zeal, it makes those businesses strongly reconsider their commitment to their community as corporate citizens. Being the largest U.S. state by population by far, it’s impractical for most medium-to-large businesses to not have some sort of presence in California. However, operating in the state does not mean they have to domicile their headquarters there, and increasingly, companies have come to this conclusion and pulled up stakes from the Golden State.
Tesla is not the first company to move its corporate headquarters out of California, and it certainly won’t be the last. Unfortunately, the political leaders in the state seem to be blasé and indifferent at best to this trend, if not downright hostile toward corporate citizens. While Tesla’s move may seem symbolic, it is indicative of the feelings of many, both private citizens as well as businesses.
The Democratic party of decades past was able to approach government with a balanced pragmatism that tempered their desire for social justice and defense of “the little guy” with the reality that their dreams for an egalitarian society needed to be somehow paid for through taxes and cooperation of businesses, and knew that an overzealous approach would result in antagonism, or outright active opposition.
I don’t want to make this post a treatise on liberal vs. conservative politics, nor a line-by-line comparison of the relative merits or disadvantages of California vs. Texas. My only hope is that both the citizens and political leadership of California come to the realization that true “progress” requires collaboration between the public and private sectors, and that liberal activists’ privileged position in California’s politics should not be used as an offensive bludgeon against perceived political “enemies,” but a starting point for negotiation in crafting balanced, pragmatic solutions that could be a win-win for all involved.
Until that epiphany is reached, I fear we will see a continued exodus of businesses from The Golden State.
(Images courtesy Tesla)
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