Between Elon Musk and San Francisco, it's a story of 'I love you ... me neither' to use a song by French singer Serge Gainsbourg.
The billionaire entrepreneur has a complicated relationship with the mecca of tech. He criticizes her very violently because she represents, according to him, the bastion of the “woke mind virus”, which he has made mission to defeat.
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For the serial entrepreneur, the "woke mind virus" is made up of new progressive ideologies, often aligned to the left of the Democratic Party. This manifests itself through the promotion of ESG, gender identity, or pronouns.
He believes that ESG and pronouns are expressions of wokeism that lead to cancel culture, in other words, to intolerance and the dictatorship of thought.
ESG stands for environmental, social and corporate governance, while "pronouns" points to the gender identity debate. It means people have to stop assuming that gender is binary and to accept that everyone has the right to decide how they want to be referred to: he/his/him, she/hers/her or they/theirs/them.
Attacks
San Francisco, as the flagship tech city of the progressive state of California, is therefore the center of this "woke mind virus," according to Musk. As a result, at the end of 2021, the billionaire notably moved Tesla's headquarters from California to Texas. He also moved out of Silicon Valley and now lives near Austin.
But the tech mogul was recently forced to spend more time in San Francisco, after acquiring Twitter for $44 billion. He has been spending a lot of time at the headquarters of the platform in the heart of the city. He was quick to attack the municipality which is in the hands of the Democrats.
"So city of SF attacks companies providing beds for tired employees instead of making sure kids are safe from fentanyl," the billionaire posted on Dec. 6 with a link to an article about a dad who revealed that his 10-month-old baby suffered an accidental fentanyl overdose at a San Francisco playground. "Where are your priorities @LondonBreed!?"
Musk's attack came as San Francisco City Hall was investigating reports that the entrepreneur had beds set up at Twitter headquarters for employees he had asked to work long hours. The billionaire, who had laid off 5,200 of Twitter's 7,500 employees, had decided to transform certain rooms into dystopian bedrooms.
His distrust of San Francisco had pushed him, in January, to request, through his attorneys, for the transfer of his civil trial to Texas, a trial taking place in the tech city and linked to tweets from 2018.
"For the last several months, the local media have saturated this district with biased and negative stories about Mr. Musk,” Alex Spiro, Musk's lawyer, wrote in a court filing, referring to the layoffs at Twitter.
"A substantial portion of the jury pool ... is likely to hold a personal and material bias against Mr. Musk as a result of recent layoffs at one of his companies as individual prospective jurors — or their friends and relatives — may have been personally impacted."
The request was rejected and the trial was held in San Francisco. The verdict was handed down on Feb. 3, and it cleared Musk of allegations of fraud that certain investors made against him, related to the billionaire's summer 2018 tweets about Tesla, which was then on the verge of bankruptcy.
'Tragic'
Musk was quick to react, hailing the wisdom of the people.
"Thank goodness, the wisdom of the people has prevailed!" the billionaire tweeted. "I am deeply appreciative of the jury’s unanimous finding of innocence in the Tesla 420 take-private case."
He was then asked by a Twitter user to "take back" the city.
"Take back San Francisco and the woke mind virus fizzles out forever."
"You’re right," the billionaire responded.
Musk seems to be getting more and more interested in the city. He has just been moved by a video posted on the internet, showing what it appears to be empty streets, offices and buildings in Downtown San Francisco, the city's business center. The creator of the video claimed that the city has become a ghost town.
"San Francisco is getting 'emptier and emptier," the Twitter user said. "Last time I went a man was urinating on the Twitter building and the only people on the street were angry press trying to snap photos of @elonmusk. Sad what’s happened to this town and scary they think they know best for the world."
"Tragic," Tesla (TSLA) CEO commented. "I hope SF comes back from this emptiness. It is such a beautiful city with so many amazing people."
Office vacancy in San Francisco is among the highest in the nation – with space in the city the quickest to empty out, according to the San Francisco Business Times, citing Cushman & Wakefield. The city’s vacancy rate grew from 5.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019 to 24.1 percent at the end of 2022, an increase of 346 percent.
San Francisco is a victim, like other big cities, of remote work. Many tech companies have notably adopted remote work permanently, in the face of the refusal of many employees to return to work. Added to this is the fact that most tech companies are drastically cutting costs to adapt to the economic downturn.
