Elon Musk has moved to Texas to focus on two big priorities for his companies: SpaceX’s new Starship spacecraft and Tesla Inc.’s new Gigafactory, currently under construction in Austin, the CEO for both companies said Tuesday.
“I have moved to Texas,” Musk said, speaking in a live interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Musk, 49, has lived in the Los Angeles area, where SpaceX is headquartered, for two decades. Tesla is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., and its main factory is across San Francisco Bay in Fremont, Calif.
Tesla is expanding its global operations with a new factory in Shanghai that opened last year and another being built in Berlin. Musk, who has always been highly-mobile, often travels between his company’s facilities on his private Gulfstream jet.
“It wasn’t necessarily a great use of my time here (in California)”.
Texas might potentially offer some tax reprieve for the world’s second richest man. It does not collect personal income tax while California has some of the highest state tax rates in the U.S.
On Tesla’s move to raise $5 billion in capital, Musk said: “We thought we can retire a lot of the debt and increase the security of the company … have more of a war chest.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
