SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he will move his company’s headquarters across state lines over a new law concerning the privacy of LGBTQ+ kids.
Elon Musk said Tuesday (July 16) he will move SpaceX from Hawthorne, Calif. — the state where the legislation was signed — to Texas, where the company performs launches of Starship. Texas leans in a different political direction than California; various new laws in the Lone Star State to diminish the rights of LGBTQ+ communities and reproductive rights caused legal groups to a file a complaint with the United Nations in January, according to the Texas Standard.
The new Californian law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday, prohibits schools from informing parents if their child changes names or pronouns and requests privacy. It’s the first such state law in the U.S. and came after more than a dozen Conservative-led Californian school boards in the past year put in policies requiring parents be informed, according to the New York Times.
“The governor of California just signed a bill causing massive destruction of parental rights and putting children at risk for permanent damage,” Musk wrote on X, formerly Twitter, which the billionaire PayPal co-founder owns. X will also move to Austin, Texas from San Francisco, Musk wrote in a separate post. Musk’s children include a transgender daughter who cut of all communication with him due to political disagreements between the two.
In 2022, Musk’s transgender daughter petitioned to change her name and receive a new birth certificate from the Los Angeles County Superior Court in Santa Monica, according to Reuters. “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form,” she wrote.
Musk later told the Financial Times that he believes his daughter disowned him because, in his view, “neo-Marxists” are running top-tier universities and schools like what his daughter is attending.
“It’s full-on communism […] and a general sentiment that if you’re rich, you’re evil,” Musk said in the interview, of his opinion of what elite educational institutions represent. Concerning his daughter, he added: “It [the relationship] may change, but I have very good relationships with all the others [children]. Can’t win them all.”
The 53-year-old Musk is father to 12 known children with three different women, according to various media reports. Musk told workers in 2021 at electric carmaker Tesla (another company he owns) that “If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble,” Wired once wrote.
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Also in recent days, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Musk is contributing $45 million a month to former president Donald Trump’s Republican bid for re-election to the Oval Office in 2024. GLAAD, a non-profit LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, has tracked numerous ways in which Trump is moving against that community.
GLAAD notes that anti-LGBTQ+ states tend to target other groups as well. “States proposing bills targeting mainstream health care for transgender people have also enacted and proposed the most restrictive bans on abortion,” GLAAD wrote. In Texas alone, GLAAD says more than 140 anti-LGBTQ bills were under consideration in the past year, aside from other legislation restricting reproductive care.
Restrictive care policies in the wake of Roe vs. Wade’s fall in 2022 have also been condemned by health organizations across the U.S., warning that rights taken away from disadvantaged groups tend to spread to larger populations over time.
“Individuals who are unable to obtain an abortion are more likely to experience worse mental and physical health, increased poverty, and prolonged contact with abusers, for example. LGBTQ+ youth are facing greater stigma, increased mental health problems, and less access to medical care,” an article in the American Psychological Association noted in January. At stake in the United States generally, the article added, is “the issue of bodily autonomy and individuals’ right to make their own decisions.”
Thousands of employees work at SpaceX. Earlier this month, eight former engineers filed a lawsuit alleging Musk frequently engaged in “sexual harassment and retaliation”, according to Wired. SpaceX has been targeted with legal action before, regarding its employment practices. The U.S. Department of Justice sued the company in 2023 alleging that job applicants who are asylum recipients or refugees have been discriminated against, among other recent incidents.
Additionally, SpaceX has been alleged of performing environmental ills in Texas to get Starship off the ground quickly to meet contract obligations, including landing astronauts on the moon for NASA’s Artemis program in 2025. The first Starship attempt at a space launch in April 2023 hurled concrete blocks from the launchpad violently into the surrounding area, which is a protected environmental refuge.
While SpaceX made changes to the pad’s design, reports of damage continue. Earlier this month, a New York Times investigation tracked numerous concerns over how more recent Starship launches affect wildlife. The news comes as SpaceX is trying to expand Starship to coastal Florida in another protected spot for vulnerable species.
Related: Why did SpaceX Starship’s debut launch cause so much damage to the pad?
Musk’s headquarters announcement Tuesday comes less than a week after his company’s entire Falcon 9 rocket fleet was grounded following the launch of a set of 20 Starlink broadband satellites — also a SpaceX business. SpaceX, which posts eye-catching rocket updates frequently on social media, followed up the bad news quickly with new imagery of Starship undergoing a static fire to prepare for a future launch.
The Falcon 9’s second stage failed while delivering the Starlinks, which will fall back to Earth. SpaceX says it has made progress in learning why. It also petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration on Monday (July 15) to allow launches to continue even as the mandatory mishap investigation continues, according to Spaceflight Now.
There are two high-profile Falcon 9 launches coming up in weeks that SpaceX likely wants to stay on schedule for: the July 31 Polaris Dawn private commercial mission funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman; and a mid-August International Space Station astronaut launch for NASA known as Crew-9.
Falcon 9 brings lucrative NASA and military contracts into SpaceX as one of the most reliable (and most frequently launched) rocket line in history. Different variants of the rocket launch humans and satellites. SpaceX figures suggest Falcon 9 has launched 364 times successfully in 14 years, with only two failures.
Musk’s October 2022 takeover of what was then called Twitter has brought the billionaire businessperson into a realm of political influence often said to be shaping the far-right discourse. In fact, Musk quoted the extremist and anti-LGBTQ+ “Libs of TikTok” account among his flurry of posts Tuesday concerning the California law.
Aside from funding Trump’s presidential bid, Musk’s influence — especially with Starlink — is also extending far into international relations. A best-selling 2023 biography by Walter Isaacson, according to the Guardian, recounted an incident in which Musk allegedly ordered his SpaceX engineers to turn off Starlink services meant to support a Ukrainian drone attack against the Russians.
Related: Russia’s war on Ukraine has caused lasting damage to international spaceflight cooperation
The offensive took place during the long-running war in Ukraine, which Russia instigated to international condemnation in 2022. NASA is among the many space agencies who have pulled out of Russian collaborations since the war erupted, aside from the ISS.
Musk’s actions in Ukraine allegedly included interfacing directly with one of the country’s deputy prime ministers about the drone attack, almost like a private diplomat. Democrats in Congress said in March they would investigate the Starlink drone incident and Musk’s influence, the Guardian wrote in a separate report.