Bill Ackman claims a 2020 Twitter dispute with politician Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher cost California billions by driving away Tesla and SpaceX

@JohnLeFevre i feel like you're exaggerating..

@grok is this true?

DPKY56 The May 2020 tweet exchange was during COVID factory fights. Tesla HQ moved to Texas in Oct 2021 mainly for taxes, regs & Gigafactory Texas. Fremont factory stayed & grew to ~22k employees; Tesla reported 47k CA staff by 2022 + new Palo Alto engineering hub. No credible data backs "hundreds of billions" lost from one tweet or the HQ shift. Realistic ballpark: low billions cumulatively in shifted high-earner taxes & corporate functions over years — heavily offset by retained/growing CA operations. Deeper CA policy issues drove broader trends.

@JohnLeFevre @RMyers47 I knew

@JohnLeFevre This single tweet @LorenaSGonzalez @AFLCIO cost California hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes, revenue, and jobs.

Yet again, more proof you just can not fix stupid!

@JohnLeFevre It’s wild that a California representative could directly cause so much harm to the populace with just a single tweet.

Spellbinding ineffable incompetence on an unprecedented level.

Talk about leaving a legacy.

@JohnLeFevre Generational fumble

Based on thr average Californian income, an average Californian taxpayer pays $11k and change per year. Elon's last tax bill there was over 11 billion. Meaning he alone was paying as much tax as a million taxpayers.

And that's before you include the payroll taxes of tens of thousands of employees from his companies. And all the peripheral taxes, such as gas taxes and sales taxes that those employees paid.

And then there is the property tax and other peripheral income the physical buildings there would generate for the state.

So even if you are a total retard and swallow the whole "pays nothing in taxes" myth, you are still completely wrong.

@JohnLeFevre “Message received” may be the most expensive political "own" in history !

@JohnLeFevre @Cernovich With that kind of money, they could've extended the high speed rail line halfway past the next onion field.

@JohnLeFevre She should have been fired for negligence right then

@JohnLeFevre Weird since all I've heard all day on here is Elon doesn't pay taxes despite paying more taxes than anyone on the planet.

@JohnLeFevre @almostjingo What’s absolutely crazy is that she dropped this tweet, wrecked a huge portion of the state’s economy, and then just left her job — leaving everyone else has to contend with the results of her emotionally incontinent outburst.

@JohnLeFevre @Cernovich Elon was very smart to get the hell out of CA. Everyone who is not a liberal communist idiot needs to get the hell out.

@JohnLeFevre Could literally have built a mile of high speed rail with the windfall.

@dqueezy @JohnLeFevre Bruh, turn your brain on.

@JohnLeFevre @Cernovich How do you get to hundreds of billions?

@dqueezy @JohnLeFevre So the employees are somehow exempt from taxes?

@JohnLeFevre The tweet didn’t cause the headquarters to move. They had already planned to do that before it happened. They also kept all their employees in California and even got more of them. Which is a shame. because California sucks ass.

@JohnLeFevre @grok if you would materialize and give a ball park number on the loss California faced since elon musk’s action to switch states aince this tweet

**alandail** SpaceX competition and fixed-price contracts have saved the US gov an estimated **$40B** on military/national security launches (per former Joint Chiefs Vice Chair Gen. John Hyten). NASA estimates another **$20-30B** saved on Commercial Crew vs. legacy cost-plus approaches. Falcon 9 cut costs ~20x per kg vs. Shuttle era. These savings dwarf the ~$20B+ in contracts awarded.