What a lovely and urgent reason to have to relocate your family. Though I guess at this point if you still work for him you probably have adopted some of his worldview
I wonder how many of his employees will quit instead of relocate (e.g. if you have a spouse who can't relocate that easily, or plenty of other reasons why relocation is massively inconvenient).. won't this endanger SpaceX' mission? (I don't give a shit about Twitter, that can burn to the ground).
And I'd bet some money that Elon hasn't done an analysis which key people SpaceX will lose by moving HQs.
I don't understand the urgency here... are there tons of SpaceX employees who are thinking "oh shit, if my kid tells the school they are transgender, the school won't be able to tell me"?
> if you still work for him you probably have adopted some of his worldview
Yea, maybe... tbh I would expect kinda the opposite given that I assume a lot of the employees are relatively young and intelligent.
Sure but in capitalism you have to do right by your shareholders and a personal gripe against some kid related thing isn’t directly shareholder related.
So are we doing snowflake feelings capitalism now? Or delivering shareholder value?
While this is true in theory, in practice the people who control _private_ companies are almost never punished for prioritising personal gain or other personal priorities over the good of the shareholders. Different story for public companies, of course, but these aren't public companies.
Musk does "whatever he damn well feels like" capitalism. He made a barely driveable eyesore and deathtrap that would have put any other company out of business, just because he wanted to make a future car. He burned $44 billion just to buy the social media platform he blames for making his daughter trans and redpill it to spite "the wokes." He couldn't care less about shareholders. He's a manchild playing with toys.
Are you one of those people who believes Elon Musk built everything by hand in a cave with scraps or something?
Musk invested in technologies other people were working on and companies other people started, and hired other people who made it all work (often, given anecdotal reports, in spite of him.) Let's please stop pretending none of that would have been possible without some singular genius on his part.
> Let's please stop pretending none of that would have been possible without some singular genius on his part
Sure, granted. The claim isn't re-usable rockets and mass-market EVs aren't possible without Musk. It's that it wouldn't be reality at scale today.
Musk has a rare combination of leadership, management and political ability that lets him coordinate large groups of people and capital on resource-intensive, long-term, long-shot goals; achieve those goals; and make money on it, thereby making the process repeatable. That doesn't excuse his nonsense public behaviour. But that behaviour, in turn, doesn't erase his accomplishments.
A company move like this has likely gone through plenty of discussion with internal stakeholders. I wouldn't expect big company moves like this to be measured on externally visible incentives and costs. Just as I wouldn't expect any big customer of AWS to pay the externally visible price tag.
But we aren't privy to such things, and what remains of messaging is communication to people like us. Musk decided that putting a spotlight on trans youth would be the content of such messaging.
Of course another possibility is that just like Twitter, Musk ignores high level advice and does whatever he wants.
If you talk to anyone who has worked for Musk, they will tell you that he most likely woke up, saw the news, and decided to move HQ without talking to anyone.
The employees, including the ones who would have to plan all the logistics, probably found out from his tweet.
Oh, Libs of TikTok. The one run by that conspiracy theorist insurrectionist. Who also doesn't seem to understand that Trump will not help Orthodox Jews (she claims to be one, in the same way that Bible-beating evangelicals claim to be Christian).
If a student wants to come out as gay and doesn't want to tell their parents, do schools inform the parents? Why should there be separate rules for identifying as transgender?
Also, given Texas's draconian laws around reproductive health, how is moving to Texas any better?
The law covers both, although you wouldn't know it from the Twitter threads linked here. Here's how the San Jose Mercury News described the law:
> prohibits school districts from implementing policies requiring teachers to disclose any information on a student’s gender identity, sexual orientation or gender expression
Sure, they are children and said children do a lot of things at school that they hide from parents. This isn't new. As long as the children are not hurting others, why should the schools care?
They shouldn’t necessarily care per se, but if they are aware of anything they should basically have to inform the parents. It’s not the school’s choice to hide various things from parents, who are ultimately responsible for children until the age of adulthood.
The population of Earth is already debatably unsustainable and solving the immediate demographic issues of the US is easier solved through immigration rather than increasing the birth rate, which is politically ironic for Elon. His position makes no sense.
This could be done by maternity/paternity leave, better daycare options, and universal health care. Musk will support none of those, but will support the options that reduce freedom and choices.
None of these actually increase birth rate, looking at countries that do do these things. Denmark, Czechia, and Sweden have expansive pro-fertility programs that have not increased the birth rate noticeably.
Musk is presumably is speaking for SpaceX families and moving to Texas can endanger their lives. If Musk said this wasn't about families, but only about his political ideology, it would be different.
Elon isn't the first and certainly won't be the last CEO to move their company/companies from high-tax, business-unfriendly States like California, Illinois, and New York to Texas. The only thing that would concern me as an investor is how heavily that will put strain on ERCOT and the Texas electrical grid... as well as home prices and congested infrastructure. Texas is likely to have the problem of people fleeing that state because it gets overrun by people from out of state buying homes sight-unseen for 30% over asking. Careful what you ask for, Texas...
Lifelong Texan here. I believe Tesla already moved engineering to Austin and then back to California. Texas has problems and politics I personally find atrocious, but there are some advantages too. Building homes is doable here (often done by crews of questionable immigration status; for sure Spanish is the primary language used) to the point that prices in Austin have actually seen declines recently.
And ERCOT seems to be doing ok these days - they keep quiet about it for political reasons I'm sure, but Texas has tons of renewables and is using batteries now to level supply out as needed. And the plans are to keep adding renewables and batteries.
The issue in Houston has nothing to do with ERCOT.
It has more to do with Centerpoint, who is the electricity provider for the city and responsible for maintaining lines. The power is there, but it can't reach homes due to the number of trees that fell on lines due to Hurricane Beryl's wind.
Please correct me if I misunderstood but I thought ERCOT is the long-haul transmission provider and they then hand off to distribution grid operators at the city/community level. The issues after the hurricane are certainly with the local distribution operators but during the winter blackout a few years back that was on ERCOT not managing supply to the Texas grid properly (as well as some other shenanigans). My concern is that if cities like Austin grow too fast in terms of electrical demand for manufacturing then ERCOT will have its hands full routing enough juice to the load demand points unless they add more generation stations closer to the demand -- and ERCOT leadership hasn't inspired confidence in recent years.
I think Houston is still having significant issues. I had cousins who were affected for days. But that was because of problems with local distribution due to the hurricane, not the overall Texas grid. ERCOT does publish system dashboards if you ever want to take a look at it - I do watch sometimes during very hot or cold days because reserves can get low, but I have not experienced systemic issues since the big freeze in 2021.
Exactly... so, you prevent the schools from telling them in the moment. The kid knows best how and when to navigate that, not the school.
Your comment hasn't clarified this for me =\
From the Guardian article: "the bill will prohibit school policies that require parents to be alerted if their child wishes to change pronouns or identifies as transgender."
Some school districts had implemented policies that forced teachers to out students to parents even when they know that would be problem. This law prevents that but still allows them to notify parents.
You're not missing anything. It's a good law. Naughty Old Mr Car is full in on the bonkers conspiratorial transphobia stuff, these days, though; you can't expect him to make a lot of sense on these things.
This is a typical knee-jerk reaction to a perfectly reasonable law that gets taken out of context and twisted to become ragebait.
The law applies to all LGBTQ+ identities, the most common being lesbian/gay, but trans is also part of it - and the trans part was singled out on twitter for some reason.
The law does not even prevent schools from outing kids. It prevents schools from FORCING employees to do it (with threat of losing their job if they don't).
School employees CAN STILL out kids to their parents in California. They just don't have to as a policy anymore. Which is perfectly reasonable, because sometimes the school employees see kids with extremely homophobic and abusive parents.
Nobody wants to out a kid to parents like that, and without this law, school employees get put in a position of asking themselves "Do I out the kid to their parents, who will likely beat them? Or do I refuse and lose my job?"
Unofficially, but they are going through the motions to make it official. The county has passed resolutions supporting it but I'm not sure if they've actually started the process of formally incorporating it.
I'm very interested to see how his MAGA heel turn affects his companies. He is undoubtably a very high performer and makes very high performing companies that good people want to work for, and they make extremely good products.
But the first thing out of everyone's mouth about a Tesla car is their opinion on Elon, and it seems very unlikely he's going to get more appealing to people who aren't Republicans.
Don't know in the States but here in Europe I think it will hurt Tesla. The only ones that are really supporting Elon are the same people who deny climate change and are against EV cars, solar energy, batteries where they suddenly are caring for coloured people in the mines,...
Empirical but I know a lot of Tesla drivers that are looking for a different brand when their lease is over. Although its not only about his politics but also quality, broken promises,... .
for SpaceX it's a bet that if Trump wins they will get far more lobbying power for contracts and Boeing/Lockheed will be even more screwed.
And while consumer opinion on Tesla and Starlink will be hurt, Elon is probably hoping to get Trump to tariff Chinese electric car competitors massively so his only competition will be domestic
No matter who wins SpaceX will get plenty of govt business they are so far ahead of everyone else not only today but in the next decade. And that is completely ignoring the Starship shaped hammer about to break the cost curve for launching to orbit in 3-5 years.
I feel like Xi Jinping (the leader of the only other country currently capable of joining that race) would just lean back and say, "Sure, I'll hold your beers...", and maybe get out his phone to record the hilarity of the attempt.
Trump is (a) a narcissist, and (b) not a _complete_ idiot. There is no world in which he does this if he wins, because it would certainly not deliver while he was still president, and in practice it would likely only deliver after he was dead (bear in mind that he's nearly 80). Anything along those lines from him should be expected to be flashy, but relatively short timelines, because it will be very important to him that it's all about him.
I'm surprised that Tesla is welcomed by Texas. They are, after all, reducing fossil fuels burnt with every car sold. I thought that supporting non-fossil energy was discouraged there.
> The law is explicit: Companies that abstain from investing in fossil fuels for strictly financial reasons, rather than as an ethical or environmental position, are not banned.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Pensions have a fiduciary duty to maximize payout to beneficiaries who have paid in. There's no room for your moral crusade when managing other people's money.
I rarely see it cited as an explicit influence but a lot of the platform of the american right today aligns with ecofascism. The rhetoric around their focus on the border particularly, their reactionary image of a romanticized, pastoral/pioneering past america. For musk specifically, the pronatalism: after all they don't think that global birth rates are too low, just some birth rates.
