Elon Musk Moves from 'Entitled' California

The Tesla CEO harshly criticized the state earlier this year over its restrictions related to COVID-19.

The latest news from Tesla centered on its attempt to raise massive amounts of cash, with the electric vehicle maker announcing this week it will seek another $5 billion in a stock offering.

But Tesla founder and chief executive Elon Musk may need to take a few days off coming up and … possibly borrow your pickup truck? That’s because Musk, a decades-long resident of Los Angeles, is making the big move from California to Texas.

Normally, nobody would care about this, but in this case, Musk has a reason that he’s divulged amid a very public spat with the state of California over its handling of the Coronavirus.

Back in spring, shutdown orders that stopped production at the Tesla Fremont factory led Musk to call the orders  “fascist” and openly defy them. At the time, he threatened to move Tesla’s headquarters from California, but reports of the prospective billion-dollar price tag might have slowed his roll on that effort. 

But that wasn’t going to stop Musk from taking his personal residence — and fortune — out of the Golden State, against which he still clearly has hard feelings. Take his comments from a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, where he complained that the Bay Area held “outsized influence on the world.” Musk also likened California to a sports team that keeps on winning, suggesting they get “complacent, a little entitled and then they don’t win the championship anymore.”

Despite all the public rancor, Musk doesn’t really need to justify his move to Texas. Not only is SpaceX building its Starship in Boca Chica, but Tesla also recently began construction on a Gigafactory in Austin. He frequently shuttles back and forth between the two states, so it’s not exactly a stretch to set up shop there.

Oh, and one more small detail that bears acknowledging: Texas has no personal income tax, while California has the highest tax in the nation on its richest residents. This seems like it might be relevant considering a recent stock award bonanza bumped Musk up to being the world’s second-richest person, leapfrogging Bill Gates.

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