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Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

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Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#41

Post by nunez »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #9

I know this is charged but it's genuine question due to my ignorance - why are companies having or moving HQs to Texas? It feels that : 1. It's way out of temperate climate that one would live in when given full choice and all things equal (understanding they never are of course - I live in great white North :) 2. Politics are highly conservative and frequently invasive. now clearly half of Americans like it that way…

Corp taxes low, cost of living low (for now), HEAPS of open space (important for Tesla), UT Austin's compsci program (which is ranked) provides a good pipeline, engineers from the Bay are moving to Austin at an increasingly high rate, and demographics are shifting more progressive.

I think the writing is on the wall for tech in CA honestly

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#42

Post by nyolfen »

dlp211 wrote: post #30
joegahona wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes are much better and a low cost of living.

> Taxes are much better Only for the upper-middle class and rich. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-19/wait-c...

texas does not have state income tax, sales taxes are about average and property taxes are higher than average

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#43

Post by brightball »

danhak wrote: post #34

California's tax regime is really backward. I suspect Tesla's departure is just the tip of the iceberg and that the repeal of the SALT deduction in 2017 really hastened this trend. High earners pay an effective tax rate of > 50%. They are partially picking up the slack from Prop 13, which artificially distorts the housing market by allowing longtime homeowners to pay property taxes based on decades-old assessed value…

I’ve long suspected that the Democratic obsession with federal policy is to try to reduce the appeal of other states where companies may want to move.

It’s often seemed like people in California would prefer that a manufacturing operations operate in Asia and come through their ports rather than operate in the middle/south US.

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#44

Post by almost_usual »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #15
tzm wrote: post #2

Yet, Tesla will still have to ship Texas cars out of state to sell to Texans.

Symbolic move with some logistic practicality with Boca Chica and his 400 sq ft tiny house [1] being home base at Starbase. All signs point to Tesla continuing manufacturing at Fremont and they just opened a Megapack manufacturing facility in Lathrop, CA (hiring 1k-2k workers) [2]. The irony that "pro business, less regulation" Texas doesn't allow direct to consumer sales of Teslas. [1] https://www.architecturaldiges…

A 400 sq ft tiny house in Texas, mega mansion in Hillsborough (Bay Area).

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-takes-last-remaini...

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#45

Post by larsiusprime »

kiklion wrote: post #40
larsiusprime wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost of living is one of many reasons. Highly sought after tech workers (like all workers) would prefer not to hand a huge portion of their salary straight over to their landlord. And tech workers, unlike most workers, actually have a bit of leverage under current market conditions to demand stuff. Texas actually has some of the highest property taxes[1] in the nation, which (unintuitively to some) helps keep down th…

Am I misunderstanding or are you basically saying that the monthly cost of housing is roughly equivalent so more taxes = lower home prices, such that taxes + principal + interest is the same in both places?

To clarify a bit: The monthly cost of renting a house is way higher in California, not because it costs more to rent the house, but because it costs more to rent the land the house sits on.

Property tax taxes two things -- the house, and the land. The portion of the tax that taxes the land is capitalized into the selling/renting price of the land, which is to say that causes it to cost less to buy the land and less to rent it. (The portion of property tax that taxes the building can actually be passed on to tenants (unlike the land portion of the tax) and serves to make building things more expensive, and that is bad, but since the majority of the price of houses in most urban areas is just land value, the land portion of the tax makes it a net gain).

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#46

Post by ProfessorLayton »

cletus wrote: post #27

Good. This will both alleviate pressure on the Bay Area as well as accelerating the political shift to the left in Texas. It's a win all around. I actually think that living in the Bay Area as a tech employee is increasingly unjustifiable from an ethical point-of-view. It was once the case where that was necessary for many career paths but that's increasingly not the case and the pandemic has hastened that shift. Why…

> Why unethical? Because tech workers are contributing to the displacement of the people those places need to survive.

Bay native here working in tech, and I'd argue that most SFBAY constituents are contributing to the NIMBY problem, not just tech workers. The vast majority of the workforce in the Bay doesn't work in tech, and they oppose new housing just the same.

The incentives just don't align for there to be a local solution to this problem. Unfortunately it seems this will have to be taken out of local control via bills like SB9 and SB10 that are slowly but surely chipping away at the problem.

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#48

Post by gautamcgoel »

What I'm really curious about is what happens to Austin (and to a lesser extent, Atlanta, Raleigh, Denver, SLC etc). Does Austin become the next Bay Area/next Seattle? Crazy high housing prices, and high homelessness/crime? If so, how long does that take, and what happens to native Austinites? If not, what prevents history from repeating itself?

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#49

Post by weezin »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #9

I know this is charged but it's genuine question due to my ignorance - why are companies having or moving HQs to Texas? It feels that : 1. It's way out of temperate climate that one would live in when given full choice and all things equal (understanding they never are of course - I live in great white North :) 2. Politics are highly conservative and frequently invasive. now clearly half of Americans like it that way…

Can't launch rockets from California. Splitting time between SpaceX and Tesla is a lot harder when its half way across the country.

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#50

Post by _jal »

danhak wrote: post #34

California's tax regime is really backward. I suspect Tesla's departure is just the tip of the iceberg and that the repeal of the SALT deduction in 2017 really hastened this trend. High earners pay an effective tax rate of > 50%. They are partially picking up the slack from Prop 13, which artificially distorts the housing market by allowing longtime homeowners to pay property taxes based on decades-old assessed value…

> middling infrastructure

Compared to what?

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