SpaceX and Tesla both began in California before relocating their headquarters to Texas — a move Elon Musk has said created a hiring challenge.
Musk, the CEO of both companies, said married technicians, engineers, and scientists have struggled to bring their families to certain parts of the state. The problem is most acute at SpaceX’s south Texas launch site and headquarters, known as Starbase.
“I call it the ‘significant other’ problem,” Musk said during a nearly three-hour interview with tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe’s cofounder John Collison that was posted on Thursday. “For Starbase, that was particularly difficult, since the odds of finding a non-SpaceX job are pretty low.”
Starbase — where SpaceX has built and tested its rockets since 2019 — is situated in a sparsely populated area of Texas, close to the US‑Mexico border. It’s located across from the largely undeveloped Las Palomas Wildlife Management Area.
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The campus is roughly a 40‑minute drive from Brownsville, the nearest city, according to Google Maps. Brownsville has a population of around 187,000, based on the most recent US Census data.
That remoteness marks a sharp contrast with SpaceX’s former headquarters in El Segundo, California, which is minutes from Los Angeles and part of one of the country’s largest job markets.
“It’s like a technology monastery thing,” Musk said about Starbase.
“Remote and mostly dudes.”
Tesla, which moved its headquarters from California to Austin in 2021, faces a similar — though less severe — challenge, Musk said.
The automaker’s campus, called Giga Texas, is a roughly 30-minute drive from downtown Austin, where nearly 1 million people live. Plus, while Tesla’s top executives have largely moved to Texas, the electric car company still maintains several robotics, energy, and manufacturing operations in California.
“Tesla being engineering, especially being primarily in Silicon Valley, it’s easier for people to just… They don’t have to change their life very much. Their commutes are going to be the same,” he said. “Tesla still has a majority of its engineering in California.”
Musk, who has predicted Austin will be “the biggest boomtown that America has seen in 50 years,” has made moves to build out his company campuses, including a company town called “Snailbrook” near The Boring Company and SpaceX.
