Beautiful Virgin Islands

Wednesday, Oct 08, 2025

Twitter Got A Big Tax Break To Stay In San Francisco. Jack Dorsey Now Says Its Future Is No Longer In The City.

Twitter Got A Big Tax Break To Stay In San Francisco. Jack Dorsey Now Says Its Future Is No Longer In The City.

As Twitter's home city nears a vote limiting new office space construction, the company may be forced to locate its workforce elsewhere.
Nine years ago, San Francisco gave Twitter a major, controversial tax break to stay in the city, locating the social media company’s headquarters in the bleak mid-Market neighborhood. But today, after taking the money, Twitter is putting San Francisco on mute as it plans to expand outside of the city.

“Our concentration in San Francisco is not serving us any longer and we will strive to be a far more distributed workforce,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on an earnings call Thursday. “We have to build a company that’s not entirely dependent on San Francisco.”

“Sounds like something Jack would say,” San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin, a frequent critic of the tech industry and one of the leaders of the board’s progressive faction, told BuzzFeed News. “Apparently, the only thing serving Twitter anymore is Donald Trump.”

When they introduced the Twitter tax break, politicians hoped it would revitalize the neighborhood and attract jobs to a city whose unemployment rate was several multiples above where it is today, nearing 10% in 2010.

As the city’s politics lurch leftward — unlike when the tax passed, Peskin’s faction now controls of the Board of Supervisors and the city will vote on a proposition limiting new office space construction in March — Twitter, which took tens of millions in tax incentives throughout the decade, is planning to spread its workforce across the globe. In recent years, the centrist policies championed by former mayors like Ed Lee have given way to an anti-corporate wave, including the election of a democratic socialist to the board in 2019, mirroring a change in the national Democratic party.

After the tax break expired as planned last May, there was little appetite in San Francisco to renew it. San Francisco voters also approved a ballot measure in 2018 that required companies with more than $50 million in annual revenue to pay an additional tax to help people who are homeless. Dorsey opposed the measure, saying it treated companies like Dorsey’s company Square unfairly compared to ones like Salesforce, whose CEO Marc Benioff backed it, and Square later sued the city over its tax bill.

Critics of Twitter’s tax break saw Dorsey’s comments on Thursday as a validation of their skepticism. “I'm not surprised to hear that they're not really prioritizing their presence in San Francisco,” David Campos, a former San Francisco supervisor who voted against the tax break when he was on the board in 2011, told BuzzFeed News. “I'm not surprised that they essentially benefited from a very generous tax policy by city government, only to turn around and say San Francisco is not a priority for us. Unfortunately, it's what many of us suspected.”

Ted Egan, San Francisco’s chief economist, said Dorsey’s statement was somewhat concerning. “It reinforces the fact that the city's had a challenge in keeping large companies in the city as they grow,” he told BuzzFeed News. To Egan, it was not a complete surprise, given the high price of doing business in the Bay Area, which faces skyrocketing housing costs. “It's not unexpected that a major tech company would choose to have a distributed workforce or grow globally, particularly when the cost of living differences between San Francisco and many other places are continuing to widen.”

Despite Dorsey’s announcement, it’s unclear how fast Twitter’s employee base will shift from the city, and finding the type of workers it’s looking for in other places may be its biggest challenge: Once an economic cluster is established, it’s hard to move. “This issue has been brought up many times in the past. But it's a very niche labor market,” Enrico Moretti, a University of California, Berkeley, economics professor and the author of The New Geography of Jobs, told BuzzFeed News. “Ultimately, the type of occupations that lend themselves to remote work is not huge.”

Twitter doesn’t predict a mass exodus anytime soon. “San Francisco will be where the majority of our employees will be based for the foreseeable future,” a Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News following Dorsey’s comments. “There's incredible talent around the world and we have to be able to work in a way that supports them as employees regardless of where they live, especially when they want to build careers in their own communities.”

Not all observers were opposed to the move. “There's always blowback,” said Anna Auerbach, cofounder and co-CEO of Werk, an analytics company that enables flexible work. The benefits, she said, will outweigh the costs. “It's going to help Twitter attract a really incredible talent pool, a really diverse talent pool, and my hunch is, they're going to see some really fundamental changes when it comes to productivity improvements and culture and retention.”
Newsletter

Related Articles

Beautiful Virgin Islands
0:00
0:00
Close
France: Less Than a Month After His Appointment, the New French Prime Minister Resigns
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Hungary will not adopt the euro because the European Union is falling apart.
Sarah Mullally Becomes First Woman Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury
Mayor in western Germany in intensive care after stabbing
Australian government pays Deloitte nearly half a million dollars for a report built on fabricated quotes, fake citations, and AI-generated nonsense.
US Prosecutors Gained Legal Approval to Hack Telegram Servers
Macron Faces Intensifying Pressure to Resign or Trigger New Elections Amid France’s Political Turmoil
Standard Chartered Names Roberto Hoornweg as Sole Head of Corporate & Investment Banking
UK Asylum Housing Firm Faces Backlash Over £187 Million Profits and Poor Living Conditions
UK Police Crack Major Gang in Smuggling of up to 40,000 Stolen Phones to China
BYD’s UK Sales Soar Nearly Nine-Fold, Making Britain Its Biggest Market Outside China
Trump Proposes Farm Bailout from Tariff Revenues Amid Backlash from Other Industries
FIFA Accuses Malaysia of Forging Citizenship Documents, Suspends Seven Footballers
Latvia to Bar Tourist and Occasional Buses to Russia and Belarus Until 2026
A Dollar Coin Featuring Trump’s Portrait Expected to Be Issued Next Year
Australia Orders X to Block Murder Videos, Citing Online Safety and Public Exposure
Three Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of Immune Self-Tolerance Mechanism
OpenAI and AMD Forge Landmark AI-Chip Alliance with Equity Option
Munich Airport Reopens After Second Drone Shutdown
France Names New Government Amid Political Crisis
Trump Stands Firm in Shutdown Showdown and Declares War on Drug Cartels — Turning Crisis into Opportunity
Surge of U.S. Billionaires Transforms London’s Peninsula Apartments into Ultra-Luxury Stronghold
Pro Europe and Anti-War Babiš Poised to Return to Power After Czech Parliamentary Vote
Jeff Bezos Calls AI Surge a ‘Good’ Bubble, Urges Focus on Lasting Innovation
Japan’s Ruling Party Chooses Sanae Takaichi, Clearing Path to First Female Prime Minister
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sentenced to Fifty Months in Prison Following Prostitution Conviction
Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Launch Extends Billion-Dollar Empire
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
Trump Claims FBI Planted 274 Agents at Capitol Riot, Citing Unverified Reports
India: Internet Suspended in Bareilly Amid Communal Clashes Between Muslims and Hindus
Supreme Court Extends Freeze on Nearly $5 Billion in U.S. Foreign Aid at Trump’s Request
Archaeologists Recover Statues and Temples from 2,000-Year-Old Sunken City off Alexandria
China Deploys 2,000 Workers to Spain to Build Major EV Battery Factory, Raising European Dependence
Speed Takes Over: How Drive-Through Coffee Chains Are Rewriting U.S. Coffee Culture
U.S. Demands Brussels Scrutinize Digital Rules to Prevent Bias Against American Tech
Ringo Starr Champions Enduring Beatles Legacy While Debuting Las Vegas Art Show
Private Equity’s Fundraising Surge Triggers Concern of European Market Shake-Out
Colombian President Petro Vows to Mobilize Volunteers for Gaza and Joins List of Fighters
×