SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he will move his company’s headquarters across state lines due to a new law regarding the privacy of LGBTQ+ children.
Elon Musk announced Tuesday (July 16) that he would be moving SpaceX from Hawthorne, California — the state where the law was signed — to Texas, where the company conducts Starship launches. Texas leans in a different political direction than California; several new laws in the Lone Star State aimed at diminishing LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights prompted legal groups to file a complaint with the United Nations in January, according to the Texas Standard.
The new California law, signed Tuesday by Gov. Gavin Newsom, prohibits schools from notifying parents if their child changes their name or pronouns and requests privacy. It’s the first such law in the United States and comes after more than a dozen conservative-led California school boards implemented policies in the past year requiring parents to be notified, according to The New York Times.
“The Governor of California just signed a bill that massively destroys parental rights and exposes children to permanent harm,” Musk wrote on X, formerly Twitter, which the billionaire PayPal co-founder owns. X will also be moving from San Francisco to Austin, Texas, Musk wrote in another post. Musk’s children include a transgender daughter who has cut off all communication with him over political disagreements.
In 2022, Elon Musk’s transgender daughter petitioned the Los Angeles County Superior Court in Santa Monica to change her name and issue her a new birth certificate, according to Reuters. “I no longer live with my biological father and I no longer wish to have any connection to him in any way,” she wrote.
Musk later told the Financial Times that he believed his daughter had disowned him because, he said, “neo-Marxists” run top universities and schools like the ones his daughter attends.
“It’s pure communism … and a general feeling that if you’re rich, you’re bad,” Musk said in the interview, about his views on what elite educational institutions represent. Regarding his daughter, he added: “That (relationship) can change, but I have a very good relationship with all the other (children). You can’t win them all.”
According to multiple media reports, Elon Musk, 53, is the father of 12 known children with three different women. In 2021, he told employees of electric car maker Tesla (another company he owns) that “if people don’t have more children, civilization will collapse,” Wired wrote.
Related: NASA has confidence in SpaceX after Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition
In recent days, the Wall Street Journal also revealed that Musk is contributing $45 million a month to former President Donald Trump’s Republican campaign to re-elect him to the Oval Office in 2024. GLAAD, a nonprofit advocacy organization for LGBTQ+ rights, has been tracking the many ways Trump has acted against the community.
GLAAD notes that anti-LGBTQ+ states tend to target other groups as well. “States that propose bills targeting mainstream health care for transgender people have also enacted and proposed the most restrictive abortion bans,” GLAAD writes. In Texas alone, GLAAD reports that more than 140 anti-LGBTQ bills were under consideration last year, in addition to other laws restricting reproductive health care.
Restrictive health care policies enacted in the wake of the Roe v. Wade ruling in 2022 have also been condemned by health organizations across the United States, warning that rights taken away from disadvantaged groups tend to spread to broader populations over time.
“People who cannot have an abortion are more likely to suffer from poorer mental and physical health, increased poverty, and prolonged contact with abusers, for example. LGBTQ+ youth face increased stigma, more frequent mental health problems, and limited access to medical care,” an American Psychological Association article noted in January. At issue in the United States generally, the article added, is “the question of bodily autonomy and the right of individuals to make their own decisions.”
Thousands of employees work at SpaceX. Earlier this month, eight former engineers filed a lawsuit alleging that Musk frequently engaged in “sexual harassment and retaliation,” according to Wired. SpaceX has previously been the target of lawsuits over its hiring practices. The U.S. Department of Justice sued the company in 2023, alleging that job applicants who are asylees or refugees were discriminated against, among other recent incidents.
Additionally, SpaceX has been accused of committing environmental acts in Texas to rush Starship to meet its contractual obligations, including landing astronauts on the moon for NASA’s Artemis program in 2025. Starship’s first space launch attempt in April 2023 violently threw concrete blocks from the launch pad into the surrounding area, which is a protected environmental refuge.
While SpaceX has made changes to the pad’s design, reports of damage continue to circulate. Earlier this month, a New York Times investigation highlighted widespread concerns about how recent Starship launches are affecting wildlife. This news comes as SpaceX attempts to expand Starship to the Florida coast, another protected area for vulnerable species.
Related: Why did SpaceX’s inaugural Starship launch cause so much damage to the platform?
Musk’s announcement of the headquarters comes less than a week after his company’s entire fleet of Falcon 9 rockets was grounded after launching a set of 20 Starlink broadband satellites — also a SpaceX business. SpaceX, which frequently posts eye-catching rocket updates on social media, quickly followed up the bad news with new footage of Starship undergoing a static fire to prepare for a future launch.
The second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket failed while delivering Starlinks, which will fall back to Earth. SpaceX says it has made progress in investigating the cause of the incident. The company also asked the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Monday (July 15) to allow launches to continue while a mandatory investigation into the incident continues, according to Spaceflight Now.
There are two high-profile Falcon 9 launches coming up in the coming weeks that SpaceX likely wants to stick to their schedule: the July 31 Polaris Dawn private commercial mission funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman; and a mid-August astronaut launch to the International Space Station for NASA, known as Crew-9.
The Falcon 9 rocket brings SpaceX lucrative contracts with NASA and the military because it is one of the most reliable (and frequently launched) rocket lines in history. Different variants of the rocket are capable of launching humans and satellites. SpaceX’s figures suggest that the Falcon 9 has successfully launched 364 times in 14 years, with only two failures.
Related: Rare SpaceX Rocket Failure Shows Exactly Why NASA Wants 2 Commercial Options to Fly Astronauts to the ISS
Elon Musk’s October 2022 acquisition of what was then Twitter has thrust the billionaire businessman into a realm of political influence that is often said to shape far-right discourse. In fact, Musk cited the extremist, anti-LGBTQ+ account “Libs of TikTok” among his many posts Tuesday about the California law.
In addition to funding Trump’s presidential campaign, Musk’s influence – particularly with Starlink – also extends to international relations. According to the Guardian, a best-selling 2023 biography by Walter Isaacson recounts an incident in which Musk allegedly ordered his SpaceX engineers to disable Starlink services intended to support a Ukrainian drone attack on the Russians.
Related:Russia’s war against Ukraine has caused lasting damage to international spaceflight cooperation
The offensive came during the long war in Ukraine, which Russia started and drew international condemnation in 2022. NASA is among several space agencies that have withdrawn from Russian collaborations since the start of the war, outside of the ISS.
Musk’s actions in Ukraine reportedly included speaking directly with one of the country’s deputy prime ministers about the drone strike, almost like a private diplomat. Democrats in Congress said in March that they would investigate the Starlink drone incident and Musk’s influence, the Guardian wrote in a separate report.