It’s hard to overstate the precise attention to detail, as well as the financial investment, that went into designing the San Francisco headquarters of the influential social media company formerly known as Twitter. Designers famously relocated not one but two nineteenth-century homesteader cabins from rural Montana to the inside of the company’s luxurious downtown office. The purpose: providing employees with a novel space for lounging—an activity countless other workplaces have supported with a few couches and a coffee machine.
During a short-lived era of tech-company extravagance, there was much relaxation, often in the guise of “brainstorming” and “team building,” to be had at the Twitter headquarters. The company stylishly localized the multistory space, but not in a way that might have been construed as cliché. Designers built a heavily curated office that featured tiling from across the bay in Sausalito, wood salvaged from a former local transportation terminal, free gourmet cafes that used locally sourced ingredients, inspirational artwork celebrating LGBTQ pride, and a breezy rooftop deck that housed native flora and hosted family-friendly yoga classes. “We don’t do things like ‘Hey look at this picture of Golden Gate Bridge’ to show we’re in San Francisco,” Tracy Hawkins, then the company’s global head of real estate and workplace, told Built in San Francisco, an online community that covers tech companies, in 2020. “We go out to local architects and local companies so we can get folks who really know all the best vendors in the community.”
But after buying Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022 and renaming it X, Elon Musk began cutting back. He eliminated 80 percent of the company’s workforce and ditched janitorial services, prompting some employees who remained to bring their own toilet paper to work. He auctioned off at least one beer dispenser and a $10,000 pizza oven.
Now, after he announced plans this summer to relocate X to Texas, it seems unlikely that the social media company’s former luxury perks will be replicated at its new location. It’s unclear when the X headquarters will be moved here and where exactly it’ll be located, and an X representative did not respond to a request for an interview. Following reports that the company has begun shutting down and subleasing a large portion of its downtown San Francisco office, it’s been rumored that X is seeking office space in downtown Austin. A recent court filing, however, indicates that the headquarters could be located thirty miles east of the capital, in Bastrop, alongside Musk’s other enterprises—SpaceX and the Boring Company.
For now, the only concrete evidence of X’s arrival in the small town of 9,955 residents is a recently erected agricultural-style building that barely rises above pastures dotted with hay bales. It’s set on a narrow county road that was nearly devoid of traffic a few short years ago but now bustles with big rigs. The low-slung, rectangular office—identified by the company as its new “Safety X Support Center”—appears to be smaller than most H-E-Bs. The center, according to X, will be devoted to eliminating material related to child sexual exploitation and hate speech, which, researchers say, has proliferated on the platform since Musk took over, threatening the company’s advertising revenue and tarnishing its reputation. Still undergoing interior construction, the building, which I visited last week, is expected to include offices for other X employees as well.
Unlike Market Square in San Francisco, the historic Art Deco building that has housed the company’s headquarters since 2012, the new outpost resembles a utilitarian, industrial warehouse, with relatively thin metal walls covering a simple concrete slab. It appears nearly identical to the next-door Boring Bodega, another gray-colored, metallic warehouse that has been refashioned into a convenience store and lounge spot that Musk constructed for employees and local residents.
Inside, a Bodega employee told me the new X facility only took a “few weeks” to construct and was built by a Houston-based company called M3. (Its representatives didn’t respond to a request for an interview.) On its website, M3 touts its buildings’ low cost, simple design, and convenience for “farming and ranching.” It adds that “M3 residential buildings can be used for a multitude of purposes including car ports, storage, animal enclosures, and more.”
If the laid-back Bodega building is any guide, the new X facility will feel decidedly less refined than the company’s West Coast offices. Inside, the open-air facility combines truck stop convenience with frat-house ambience. Metal office chairs clash with a mid-century modern teal sofa, an assortment of other living room furniture, and mismatched rugs. The lighting befits a suburban garage. Nobody has erected a nineteenth-century cabin.
During my visits, construction workers and tourists milled around vintage arcade games, a Ping-Pong table, and a television overlooking an empty bar. A man wearing a Boring Company T-shirt perched on a gently used leather couch and played video games. On a small table near the front door, locals had deposited flyers and business cards advertising drywall repair, homemade cakes, and tree-trimming services—the communal stuff of small-town Texas.
Outside, there are no gourmet restaurants, and the surrounding area isn’t exactly walkable. A visitor’s best bet for fresh grub is a food truck topped by a neon sign that says “Tortas.” In the middle of the day, however, it was closed.
Behind both buildings, which sit about a hundred feet apart, a windswept, treeless pasture stretches out toward the horizon. Plumes of dust descend on the plot of land from nearby mining operations. Boring Company employees, living in nearby trailers, have been known to dump their wastewater here, according to local observers. High-tech newcomers aside, this area, like much of Bastrop County, has been defined for the past two centuries by violent clashes between Native groups and white settlers, punishing agricultural work, and hardscrabble living. Even now, compared with the Bay Area, this place feels like a contemporary approximation of the Wild West.
From the perspective of Dean Almy, director of the Urban Design program at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, there’s value in maintaining as much of the area’s rural character as possible. The group of metallic buildings a few miles outside Bastrop, Almy said, is “essentially a trailer park,” one built with low-cost materials that add urban sprawl to an area that is ecologically sensitive and disconnected from nearby communities. “This is premanufactured housing, sitting side by side, repetitively, like a circuit board, and then connected by a road,” he said. “There’s no concept of a larger urban structure to try and bind this together into something that could be more culturally relevant.”
Almy said he’s skeptical that Musk’s new employees and businesses will be absorbed into Bastrop’s close-knit culture, even if the tech mogul follows through with plans to build more housing for employees. That’s bad not only for Bastrop, Almy said, but for Musk. “Companies, and communities, benefit when people want to live there,” he said. “What happens when you disconnect reasons for wanting to go to a place from the corporate expediency of capital? Do people really want to move to these trailer homes or work in these giant sheds in Bastrop when they could be living in San Francisco—or Austin or the Hill Country?”
Heinrich, a middle-aged Scandinavian tourist who said he’d prefer to be identified by his first name only, was exploring the Boring Bodega after taking pictures of the new X office and thought the remoteness was the point. “It’s so simple, like working in a barn,” he told me as he admired the rustic ambience. An engineer who has long been a fan of the world’s richest man, Heinrich said he’d flown across the Atlantic to see Musk’s new constellation of companies in person. He viewed the X office, with its no-nonsense aesthetic, as a clear message conveying Musk’s stated values, perhaps one aimed at the company’s former employees 1,800 miles away in San Francisco. “This place feels like a start-up culture, but almost in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “Elon is saying, ‘I want people who care about the work more than the location.’ ”
