(Reuters) -Electric-vehicle maker Tesla Inc will make its global engineering headquarters in California, Chief Executive Elon Musk and California Governor Gavin Newsom announced on Wednesday.
Tesla in December 2021 moved its headquarters from Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto, California to Austin, Texas, where it is operating a new car factory. Musk’s SpaceX rocket company also has a launch site in the southern tip of Texas.
Billionaire Musk himself moved from Los Angeles, California, to the Lone Star State, which does not have state income tax.
Musk previously criticized California for “overregulation, overlitigation, overtaxation.”
Musk had a rocky relationship at times with California, in 2020 threatening to move Tesla headquarters and future programs to Texas during a row over the closure of Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, due to COVID-19, for instance.
Tesla was close to setting up a large office in the middle of Silicon Valley, Nikkei reported earlier this month.
Back in 2021, Tesla also expanded its presence in Palo Alto despite a looming headquarters move, by leasing office space from HP Inc near the electric carmaker’s previous headquarters in Palo Alto, California, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters at that time.
(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin in San Francisco and Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli, Chizu Nomiyama and Mark Porter)