Originally published at: Musk brings Tesla's HQ back to California | Boing Boing
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In all seriousness, I hope everyone on the California side thought this through. Musk has earned quite a reputation for stiffing his landlords on rent lately.
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5D chess! 5D chess! He meant to do this all along!
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I think he’s trying to have it both ways. He’s keeping the corporate HQ in TX, and its engineering HQ in CA. No idea what this means in practice.
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I would guess they call it “tax management” but I only play 2d chess.
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I’m not sure how long it has been since the heyday of Musk’s broad popularity, when people were calling him the real-life Tony Stark.
Seems these days the more appropriate comparison would be Dr. Evil or maybe Hank Scorpio (though Hank seems to care for his employees more than Musk does).
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I’m reminded that he’s been courting right wingers only to have them still implement draconian laws wrt EVs to protect the oil / coal industries (e.g., Wyoming). Perhaps the point was to make EV tech more politically appealing for the wing nuts, but that didn’t pan out?
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Kinda hard to keep an EV car company running in a state that loses power every time the temperature dips.
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This illustrates one of the core problems of the “national divorce” fantasy being pushed by EmptyG and other assets of the Putin regime. A purely red state would be one with constantly deteriorating infrastructure and a social climate that would repel any educated young worker with the ability to think critically. The economy would be like Putin’s Russia, assuming the state was lucky enough to have natural resources that importers still wanted.
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Yeah, I really hope California has set themselves up so they won’t be on the hook for when Tesla goes down in flames, much less actually gave them incentives to return.
And any evil genius villain is still a genius - or at least not as obviously stupid as Elno has turned out to be.
I’m reminded of when Toyota, I think it was, was looking to open a factory in a deeply red state, with the low cost of doing business being appealing. They quickly gave up, as the infrastructure was bad and the workforce not literate enough to be trained. I think they ended up in Canada…
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The amount of goodwill he squandered is just staggering.
In popular discourse, he’s gone from being mentioned admiringly in popular franchises (Star Trek and the MCU) to being reviled as a thin-skinned right wing reactionary trolley.
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…or gets too hot.
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Tax breaks only get a state so far, especially if the company being courted is in the tech industry.
There was a lot to criticise about how Amazon conducted its beauty contest for its HQ2 location, but it laid out very clearly what a location needed to offer to them (or any other big tech company) besides tax breaks.*
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4112684-Amazon-Requirements
A Gilead state would be known for a lot of things, but not for R1 universities, quality K-12 education, diverse cities with vibrant cultural life, airports with routes to major world political and economic capitals, or well-maintained roads and infrastructure.
[* In the case of NYC, the tax breaks ended up making the city rescind the bid after it was declared a winner.]
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It was probably worth it for him to change residences before he liquidated enough stock to buy his latest plaything company.
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Perhaps Paramount will eventually clarify that the Elon Musk referred to in that episode was a groundbreaking genius who was born in the year 2097 who just happened to have the misfortune of sharing a name with the Twitter doofus guy.
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I refuse to call it that term. Preferring “secession” or “treason”.
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“Treasonous ‘national divorce’ fantasy.”
“Secessionist ‘national divorce’ fantasy.”
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Also tax breaks are meaningless to a state if it has to pay more for infrastructure than the revenue and new jobs it will create.
Amazon wanted its HQ in a rather crowded area near the marshalling yards of the Long Island Railroad. Land that can’t be developed very much due to physical limitations and would have put a massive strain on subways, narrow streets and already exorbitant housing.
NYC didn’t see the benefit to them or people living and working there.
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His board must not perform any oversight.
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