Shutterstock / Frederic Legrand - COMEO
Elon Musk puts on his "deep thinker" face at a technology conference last year in Paris. (That's France, not Texas.)
On Tuesday, billionaire Elon Musk declared he's moving the headquarters of his social media platform X and his space company SpaceX from California to Texas, triggering a flurry of high fives from the Lone Star State's Republican leaders.
“This cements Texas as the leader in space exploration,” Gov. Greg Abbott, who has a history of sphincter snorkeling Musk, gushed on his bestest buddy's very own social media platform.
Get real, Gov.
Anyone who thinks Musk, who's already personally relocated to Texas and plopped the HQ of his electric car company Tesla here in 2021, is making his latest proclamation because he loves Texas' people, culture, weather or beautiful outdoors needs to wake up and smell the bullshit.
To believe Musk, his decision to retreat further from the Golden State came because he was incensed that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law barring school districts from telling teachers that they must notify families if they learn a student has changed gender identity.
“This is the final straw. Because of this law and many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California to Starbase, Texas,” Musk tweeted. “I did make it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children.”
While Musk's excuse might draw applause from the far-right trolls who have become his cheering section as he has ruined Twitter ... oops, we mean X ... anyone paying even cursory attention to the billionaire's track record understands that it's not the real reason he's set his sights on Texas.In reality, Musk couldn't muster up a wet fart about California parents, California kids or California schools. Instead, he's convinced Abbott's Texas offers the kind of corporations-are-always-right deregulation that will allow him to run his businesses free of obligations to workers, the environment, neighbors or, well, anyone else other than Elon Musk.
Need proof? Just look at the kind of good neighbor Musk's been since he planted SpaceX's launch facility — called Starbase — near Brownsville.
Last spring, a rocket test flight ignited fires in a nearby wildlife refuge, hurled chunks of metal and concrete thousands of yards and coated cars and homes miles away with powdery debris, according to an Express-News report. Neat!
In November of last year, SpaceX sought a regulatory permit to spew up to 200,000 gallons of treated waste and sewage water into a South Texas bay that was designated the state's first coastal nature preserve. Way to go!
More recently, whistleblowers at Musk's Boring Co. — yes, the same firm that issued a laughable proposal to build an underground tunnel between downtown San Antonio and the airport — complained to regulators that they'd been exposed to "life-threatening risks" during its projects. Sounds like a delightful place to work!
Despite Abbott's sycophantic eagerness to roll out the red carpet, it's hard to figure out how any of those things — much less the many other moral missteps Musk has made while striving to further bolster his personal fortune and fragile ego — bode well for his future as a sterling corporate citizen.
Elon, if you're hell bent on racing to the bottom, try Florida.
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