13 ms·

It’s been a while since we had sf offices, but back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes. I’d imagine this is

by bcx 2y ago

It’s been a while since we had sf offices, but back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes. I’d imagine this is likely a factor in the decision. I know for a while they were waiving some of these taxes for companies who set up offices in certain parts of the city. E.g. zendesk got a big tax break for its market street location near the tenderloin. As for commutes, I’d be pretty curious to know how many folks who work at Twitter actually show up to their offices every day, especially in eng roles. Even with a return to office mandate I can’t imagine this not becoming more hybrid over time (of course I’ve never worked for musk or his managers — but I’d assume that if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in the office). Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park. I’d be curious to know: - how folks who work at X think about this move? - how much remote work will be allowed? - tax savings. - lease savings. I’d bet getting rid of sf tax nexus was a key piece of the reason.

gmerc 2y ago
[flagged]
drewda 2y ago
That SF's payroll tax exemption was specifically created for Twitter: https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/twitter-will-get-payroll-tax-break-to-stay-in-s-f-2375948.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/twitter-will-get-pa... Here's one summary of it as of last year: > The infamous "Twitter tax break" provided by former Mayor Ed Lee to lure companies, including Twitter, to mid-Market by exempting them from a portion of their payroll taxes, had its sunset in 2019. Many argued that it did little to revitalize mid-Market — and certainly Twitter former fancy cafeteria didn't help in terms of workers spending money at local businesses — and it just ended up costing the city about $10 million a year in lost revenue. > https://sfist.com/2023/02/09/mayor-london-breed-announces-tax-breaks/ https://sfist.com/2023/02/09/mayor-london-breed-announces-ta... When the Twitter tax break expired in 2019, the Chronicle also did a pretty thorough survey of the mixed effects: https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/mid-market/ https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/mid-market/
- aqme28 2y ago
  I'm really curious if there has been a comprehensive study on incentive corporate tax breaks like these. It has become my understanding that these are rarely worth it. Reminds me on this very interesting video on the subject focusing on Louisiana (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38)
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    A tax on gross receipts is going to discourage any big business from locating in the city. You shouldn't ask "what incentive of these tax breaks" are, but rather "was it worth have Twitter/Google/Stripe/... downtown" or not.
- golergka 2y ago
  > $10 million a year in lost revenue This assumes that the company would be based on the city regardless. It's very common to see these assumptions in news articles about tax breaks, and it never makes sense.
  - liquidgecka 2y ago
    I dealt with the Twitter office move stuff and there was a real honest to goodness push to get is to love to an office in South San Francisco so we could avaint the payroll tax and have parking. Had it not been for the tax break I suspect they would have left SF completely.
  - colonwqbang 2y ago
    Yes it's a thing people do. We tax oil and cigarettes and people understand it makes people not want to buy oil and cigarettes anymore. Tax something good like working in SF, people don't seem to understand it has the same effect.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  I worked in mid-market/the TL from 2014 until 2017. The tech companies sort of helped. A handful of hip restaurants and bars sprung up, but the city never really dealt with the homeless. There are a lot of non-profits serving the homeless in the TL, and there wasn't really anywhere for them to go as an alternative. >> $10 million a year in lost revenue That's 1.5% of the homeless budget.
anotherhue 2y ago
during one visit to those Zendesk offices an urgent slack message (verily) was sent out advising everyone to get away from the windows, as there was shooting outside. About 10 minutes later also via Slack the CEO announced not to worry it was simply one drug dealer shooting another drug dealer in the back. Everyone could return to their desks. I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger until the parent comment.
- dmix 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ahuth 2y ago
    SF certainly has its challenges. But in my 9 years of working in the financial district I never saw something like this. Obviously others will have different experiences than me. Point is, you can find crime and bad things in any city. San Francisco has work to do, but isn't the hell-hole people or the news make it out to be.
    - ianhawes 2y ago
      Thats odd because SF _has_ been the hell-hole people and the media have described it as in my own experiences. It would seem to me that Chicago, NYC, LA do have "bad parts" but they're distinctly separate from the "good parts". San Francisco's bad parts and good parts have evidently merged. I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.
      - ahuth 2y ago
        As I said, everyone's experience has been different. Sorry you've had a bad experience in SF. This just hasn't been my experience (no gaslighting involved...)
      - VancouverMan 2y ago
macinjosh 2y ago
I can’t find it because X search sucks, but Musk has stated before he despises the concept of remote work.
- whamlastxmas 2y ago
  [flagged]
daghamm 2y ago
"I’ve never worked for musk or his managers — but I’d assume that if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in the office" I have and believe me it's kind of random and dependent on the mood. The problem is that even if you are a 100x engineer the guy in the bad mood today may not know or care who you are.
- UncleOxidant 2y ago
  I can't understand why anyone would willingly take a job at one of his companies (but especially Xitter) at this point just knowing what's publicly known... but it's also not difficult to find someone who has worked for him and can tell you what that experience was like.
  - mrastro 2y ago
    Generally agree but one cohort are folks on H1B visas that have their residency tied to their employment status with a particular company. It's transferable to a different company but requires getting an offer to another company large enough to do H1B sponsorships. I wouldn't be surprised if the % of people working on X on an H1B rose since Elon took over.
  - TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
    For highly competitive people, it's the perfect place to be. There's comradery in the suck, long hours and seemigly crazy demands of Elon. At the end of the day you are sourrounded by people obsessed with the mission and working extremely long hours on cool shit. After two internships at Tesla i understood why people joined cults.
  - lmm 2y ago
    Any US company could randomly fire you for no reason and many US companies do.
slowmovintarget 2y ago
Didn't Elon also give a politically motivated reason for moving his HQs out of California? [1] [1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB1955 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  I could imagine him having a variety of reasons, but in certain situations pretending it's only one of them, to apply pressure. I don't have any special knowledge in this situation, I'm just drawing on my understanding of people.
- georgeburdell 2y ago
  He’d been threatening it since at least the Covid/Alameda County spat. It’s transparently just him trying to save 13.3% on capital gains taxes
- SeenNotHeard 2y ago
  It was widely reported that Musk was moving X and SpaceX's offices to Texas due to a new LGBTQ+ reporting law for schools, which in turn was heralded as Yet Further Proof of California's demise. https://dailycaller.com/2024/07/16/elon-musk-spacex-headquarters-california-lgbt-law/ https://dailycaller.com/2024/07/16/elon-musk-spacex-headquar... Now we're hearing that he's moving X's offices to the South Bay Area. Go figure.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
> Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park. This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16 minutes to get from my door in 21st and Valencia to the door at 313 Brandan next to South Park. This touches on some positive trends in San Francisco: of course, I e-bike, so I can get anywhere pretty fast, and the infrastructure improvements have made things faster and safer. I’m not really sure whom the bike is not a good fit for, so my expectation is commuters will catch up to this trend. More people will bike, resulting in vastly less toil, and better use of the city infrastructure overall. Separately as a business owner, I’m not sure there is a generalizable strategy to office locations, even to tax avoidance. You want pretty smart people working for you, and smart people like spending 16 minutes on a journey instead of 50 minutes, and they can figure out how to do a lot of things more efficiently, and they’re going to all live together, and maybe that’s the value that locality in San Francisco provides: an aggregation of tradeoffs that people who apply themselves 100% to everything can enjoy.
- runarberg 2y ago
  Yeah, I’m not buying it either, I did a quick google map survey and it seems that commute times goes between 20-40 minutes between the Mission and South Park, depending on where in the Mission you start. In all cases biking is around 20 minutes. Meanwhile only the trainride station to station between Menlo Park and SF is 45 minutes minimum (6 stops), assuming some commute time to the Menlo Park station and a 10 min walk after the train arrives, 50 min is cutting it short. The commute from Mission gives you a variety of options, you could even walk it if you have the time (personally, I used rollerblades when I lived in the Mission and worked maybe half the way to South Park).
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    If you have a bike Menlo Park is close enough to the Palo Alto station that it might save you a few minutes to catch the Baby Bullet from there, which only stops three times.
    - 2y ago
hintymad 2y ago
> back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes I always wonder what SF has done to deserve the added taxes? Did they keep the crime rate low? Did they keep improving the city's infra? Did they create a culture that people tolerate each other? Did they improve the quality of education? Did they improve the situation of the homeless community? Did they resolve the housing crisis? Our forefathers fought for no representation no taxes. I don't know what representation I got in the city.
- snotrockets 2y ago
  People want (wanted?) to live and work there, because not everyone wants to live in suburbia, and enough employers want (wanted?) to attract those people. Before my employer made the adult decision to go remote only, it opened an SF office in additional to the peninsula one, because some people (like myself) wouldn’t commute to Palo Alto.
hnburnsy 2y ago
Wonder if these SF targeted taxes contributed to the move. I think Musk was debating Benioff about the HGR recently, something about payment processing and gross receipts... Overpaid Executive Tax (OE) https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/overpaid-executi https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/overpaid-executi... Homelessness Gross Receipts Tax (HGR) https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/homelessness-gro https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/homelessness-gro...

by bcx 2y ago

gmerc 2y ago

[flagged]

drewda 2y ago

That SF's payroll tax exemption was specifically created for Twitter: https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/twitter-will-get-payroll-tax-break-to-stay-in-s-f-2375948.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/twitter-will-get-pa... Here's one summary of it as of last year: > The infamous "Twitter tax break" provided by former Mayor Ed Lee to lure companies, including Twitter, to mid-Market by exempting them from a portion of their payroll taxes, had its sunset in 2019. Many argued that it did little to revitalize mid-Market — and certainly Twitter former fancy cafeteria didn't help in terms of workers spending money at local businesses — and it just ended up costing the city about $10 million a year in lost revenue. > https://sfist.com/2023/02/09/mayor-london-breed-announces-tax-breaks/ https://sfist.com/2023/02/09/mayor-london-breed-announces-ta... When the Twitter tax break expired in 2019, the Chronicle also did a pretty thorough survey of the mixed effects: https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/mid-market/ https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/mid-market/

aqme28 2y ago
I'm really curious if there has been a comprehensive study on incentive corporate tax breaks like these. It has become my understanding that these are rarely worth it. Reminds me on this very interesting video on the subject focusing on Louisiana (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTic9btP38)
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  A tax on gross receipts is going to discourage any big business from locating in the city. You shouldn't ask "what incentive of these tax breaks" are, but rather "was it worth have Twitter/Google/Stripe/... downtown" or not.
golergka 2y ago
> $10 million a year in lost revenue This assumes that the company would be based on the city regardless. It's very common to see these assumptions in news articles about tax breaks, and it never makes sense.
- liquidgecka 2y ago
  I dealt with the Twitter office move stuff and there was a real honest to goodness push to get is to love to an office in South San Francisco so we could avaint the payroll tax and have parking. Had it not been for the tax break I suspect they would have left SF completely.
- colonwqbang 2y ago
  Yes it's a thing people do. We tax oil and cigarettes and people understand it makes people not want to buy oil and cigarettes anymore. Tax something good like working in SF, people don't seem to understand it has the same effect.
dehrmann 2y ago
I worked in mid-market/the TL from 2014 until 2017. The tech companies sort of helped. A handful of hip restaurants and bars sprung up, but the city never really dealt with the homeless. There are a lot of non-profits serving the homeless in the TL, and there wasn't really anywhere for them to go as an alternative. >> $10 million a year in lost revenue That's 1.5% of the homeless budget.

anotherhue 2y ago

during one visit to those Zendesk offices an urgent slack message (verily) was sent out advising everyone to get away from the windows, as there was shooting outside. About 10 minutes later also via Slack the CEO announced not to worry it was simply one drug dealer shooting another drug dealer in the back. Everyone could return to their desks. I never understood why the company would put its employees in danger until the parent comment.

dmix 2y ago
[flagged]
- ahuth 2y ago
  SF certainly has its challenges. But in my 9 years of working in the financial district I never saw something like this. Obviously others will have different experiences than me. Point is, you can find crime and bad things in any city. San Francisco has work to do, but isn't the hell-hole people or the news make it out to be.
  - ianhawes 2y ago
    Thats odd because SF _has_ been the hell-hole people and the media have described it as in my own experiences. It would seem to me that Chicago, NYC, LA do have "bad parts" but they're distinctly separate from the "good parts". San Francisco's bad parts and good parts have evidently merged. I do not understand why people who live in SF have to effectively gaslight themselves into believing that the breakdown of certain basic tenants of society is part of the culture of their city.
    - ahuth 2y ago
      As I said, everyone's experience has been different. Sorry you've had a bad experience in SF. This just hasn't been my experience (no gaslighting involved...)
    - VancouverMan 2y ago

macinjosh 2y ago

I can’t find it because X search sucks, but Musk has stated before he despises the concept of remote work.

whamlastxmas 2y ago
[flagged]

daghamm 2y ago

"I’ve never worked for musk or his managers — but I’d assume that if folks are high output he would not care how often they were in the office" I have and believe me it's kind of random and dependent on the mood. The problem is that even if you are a 100x engineer the guy in the bad mood today may not know or care who you are.

UncleOxidant 2y ago
I can't understand why anyone would willingly take a job at one of his companies (but especially Xitter) at this point just knowing what's publicly known... but it's also not difficult to find someone who has worked for him and can tell you what that experience was like.
- mrastro 2y ago
  Generally agree but one cohort are folks on H1B visas that have their residency tied to their employment status with a particular company. It's transferable to a different company but requires getting an offer to another company large enough to do H1B sponsorships. I wouldn't be surprised if the % of people working on X on an H1B rose since Elon took over.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
  For highly competitive people, it's the perfect place to be. There's comradery in the suck, long hours and seemigly crazy demands of Elon. At the end of the day you are sourrounded by people obsessed with the mission and working extremely long hours on cool shit. After two internships at Tesla i understood why people joined cults.
- lmm 2y ago
  Any US company could randomly fire you for no reason and many US companies do.

slowmovintarget 2y ago

Didn't Elon also give a politically motivated reason for moving his HQs out of California? [1] [1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB1955 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

CoastalCoder 2y ago
I could imagine him having a variety of reasons, but in certain situations pretending it's only one of them, to apply pressure. I don't have any special knowledge in this situation, I'm just drawing on my understanding of people.
georgeburdell 2y ago
He’d been threatening it since at least the Covid/Alameda County spat. It’s transparently just him trying to save 13.3% on capital gains taxes
SeenNotHeard 2y ago
It was widely reported that Musk was moving X and SpaceX's offices to Texas due to a new LGBTQ+ reporting law for schools, which in turn was heralded as Yet Further Proof of California's demise. https://dailycaller.com/2024/07/16/elon-musk-spacex-headquarters-california-lgbt-law/ https://dailycaller.com/2024/07/16/elon-musk-spacex-headquar... Now we're hearing that he's moving X's offices to the South Bay Area. Go figure.

doctorpangloss 2y ago

> Even commuting within sf can be kind of a pain it took our folks 50 minutes from both areas in the mission and Menlo Park to get to an office in South Park. This is not to impunge on your credibility, but it takes me 16 minutes to get from my door in 21st and Valencia to the door at 313 Brandan next to South Park. This touches on some positive trends in San Francisco: of course, I e-bike, so I can get anywhere pretty fast, and the infrastructure improvements have made things faster and safer. I’m not really sure whom the bike is not a good fit for, so my expectation is commuters will catch up to this trend. More people will bike, resulting in vastly less toil, and better use of the city infrastructure overall. Separately as a business owner, I’m not sure there is a generalizable strategy to office locations, even to tax avoidance. You want pretty smart people working for you, and smart people like spending 16 minutes on a journey instead of 50 minutes, and they can figure out how to do a lot of things more efficiently, and they’re going to all live together, and maybe that’s the value that locality in San Francisco provides: an aggregation of tradeoffs that people who apply themselves 100% to everything can enjoy.

runarberg 2y ago
Yeah, I’m not buying it either, I did a quick google map survey and it seems that commute times goes between 20-40 minutes between the Mission and South Park, depending on where in the Mission you start. In all cases biking is around 20 minutes. Meanwhile only the trainride station to station between Menlo Park and SF is 45 minutes minimum (6 stops), assuming some commute time to the Menlo Park station and a 10 min walk after the train arrives, 50 min is cutting it short. The commute from Mission gives you a variety of options, you could even walk it if you have the time (personally, I used rollerblades when I lived in the Mission and worked maybe half the way to South Park).
- saagarjha 2y ago
  If you have a bike Menlo Park is close enough to the Palo Alto station that it might save you a few minutes to catch the Baby Bullet from there, which only stops three times.
  - 2y ago

hintymad 2y ago

> back when we did sf had a pretty aggressive additional payroll tax and gross receipts taxes I always wonder what SF has done to deserve the added taxes? Did they keep the crime rate low? Did they keep improving the city's infra? Did they create a culture that people tolerate each other? Did they improve the quality of education? Did they improve the situation of the homeless community? Did they resolve the housing crisis? Our forefathers fought for no representation no taxes. I don't know what representation I got in the city.

snotrockets 2y ago
People want (wanted?) to live and work there, because not everyone wants to live in suburbia, and enough employers want (wanted?) to attract those people. Before my employer made the adult decision to go remote only, it opened an SF office in additional to the peninsula one, because some people (like myself) wouldn’t commute to Palo Alto.

hnburnsy 2y ago

Wonder if these SF targeted taxes contributed to the move. I think Musk was debating Benioff about the HGR recently, something about payment processing and gross receipts... Overpaid Executive Tax (OE) https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/overpaid-executi https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/overpaid-executi... Homelessness Gross Receipts Tax (HGR) https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/homelessness-gro https://sftreasurer.org/business/taxes-fees/homelessness-gro...