Tesla, despite moving its corporate headquarters to Texas, has announced that it still considers California to be its global engineering home base. The electric vehicle (EV) company will use a former Hewlett-Packard building in Palo Alto as its new engineering headquarters, which CEO Elon Musk said would be “effectively a headquarters of Tesla.” Musk added that the company’s plant in Fremont, which it bought in 2010 from a joint venture of General Motors and Toyota Motor Corp., will increase production to over 600,000 vehicles this year.
“This is a poetic transition from the company that founded Silicon Valley to Tesla,” Musk said. The move marks an about-face from the CEO’s previous comments about California. In 2021, when he moved Tesla’s official corporate headquarters to Texas, Musk complained about “overregulation, overlitigation, over-taxation,” and tweeted about pandemic lockdowns, saying that “Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately.”
Despite Musk’s criticisms, California has provided tax bonuses to Tesla as it grew into the EV superpower it is today. Texas, by comparison, has minimal regulation and taxes. Following news of the Inflation Reduction Act incentives, Tesla will shift its battery-production focus from Germany to the US. On Wednesday, Musk appeared with California Governor Gavin Newsom, who joked about the move: “Eat your heart out, Germany.”
