Tesla's Engineering Headquarters Will Be in California Despite Texas

Photo: Jim Watson (AP)

Tesla is reportedly making a big brick-and-mortar comeback in California after it was announced by CEO Elon Musk and Governor Gavin Newsom that the EV automaker will base its new global engineering headquarters in the state.

According to Reuters, the engineering headquarters will be in a former Hewlett Packard Building in Palo Alto, which shouldn’t be too far from Tesla’s original HQ in the area. CNBC reports the new facility will be called “HQ2″ and it is reportedly going to focus on hiring engineers in research development and artificial intelligence.

“This is a poetic transition from the company that founded Silicon Valley to Tesla,” Reuters reports Musk said at the event.

This move comes despite the fact that in December 2021, according to Reuters, Tesla moved its headquarters from Palo Alto, California, to Austin, Texas. The Lone Star State is also where the automaker built a new Gigafactory, and it’s home to Musk’s other Company, SpaceX’s launch site. Just to add more insult to injury, Musk himself moved from Los Angeles to Texas… maybe mostly to avoid income tax.

Reuters reports that Musk has previously criticized California for “overregulation, and overtaxation.” The outlet says that Musk’s tough relationship with the Golden State really got going in 2020. He threatened (and later followed through with) a plan to move Tesla’s headquarters and future programs to Texas.

The move happened during a series of Covid-19 related closures at the automaker’s plant in Fremont near San Francisco. At the time, Tesla was reportedly in the process of setting up a large office right in the middle of Silicon Valley, but those plans were eventually scrapped.

CNBC says Tesla had 47,000 employees in California in 2022. The company reportedly wrote that its wages resulted in $16.6 billion in economic activity for the state “or $44.4 million injected into California’s economy each day.”