Could Elon Musk be about to move X out of San Francisco? A property deal in the works suggests he wants out

Now the Texan émigré appears to have had enough of America’s most liberal city and may be looking to move his social media company, now called X, to politically friendlier pastures like his adopted Lone Star State.

Real estate firm JLL told the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday that its services had been retained to find a new sublease tenant for the entire 800,000-square-foot complex at its 1355 Market Street headquarters and the adjacent 1 10th building.

Landlord Shorenstein Properties, which bought it in partnership with JPMorgan via its holding SRI Nine Market Square, sued Musk early last year for being delinquent on his rent.

In March, it dropped the case without explanation. 

If Musk really is planning on relocating X, it wouldn’t be out of character for the tycoon.

In 2021, he moved Tesla’s headquarters from California to Texas in response to policymakers’ pandemic lockdowns and has now redomiciled the EV manufacturer there as well following his spat with a Delaware judge. 

Unsurprisingly, when Musk first launched his Twitter bid over two years ago, Texas Governor Greg Abbott leaped at the chance to recommend shifting Twitter’s headquarters to his state.

.@elonmusk. Bring Twitter to Texas to join Tesla, SpaceX & the Boring company.

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) April 25, 2022

Neither X Corp nor Shorenstein Properties had an immediate comment when reached by Fortune.

Spurred on by his ex-wife, Musk has claimed he bought the social media platform for $44 billion not only to accelerate his plan to clone China’s Everything app WeChat but also for the good of humanity.

He believed the microblogging site, due to its location in the heart of a crime-infested Bay Area, helped spread a “corrosive” ideology that threatened Western civilization. 

“You could literally film a Walking Dead episode unedited in downtown SF. This is where San Francisco politics leads and Twitter was exporting this self-destructive mind virus to the world,” he wrote last April.

“With some exceptions, other tech companies are still doing so. Evil in the guise of good.”

A clean break from Twitter’s historical roots?

San Francisco, the city in California with the greatest gap between rich and poor, has struggled with homelessness, crime, and fentanyl use, particularly in the aftermath of the pandemic. 

Combined with recent changes in statewide legislation raising the bar for prosecuting shoplifting and rising minimum wages, there is a constant flow of headlines from mainly small businesses leaving the greater Bay Area,creating more and more vacancies in the commercial property market. 

“I know a lot of companies that are trying to get out of their leases,” said Mayor London Breed four years ago. “There’s a lot of folks that are looking at this as an opportunity to walk away.” 

Musk and his cohort of close business associates, including David Sacks, have been vocal critics of the city’s policymakers in recent years. 

Musk blames much of the city’s woes on the local mindset that he felt needed to be stopped before it could spread any further: “Far left San Francisco/Berkeley views have been propagated to the world via Twitter.” 

Should he sublease its office space in the tech hub, it would represent a clean break from its historical roots, almost as meaningful as when he ditched its name and rebranded it X this time last year.