- By Owen Thomas | Examiner columnist
- Aug 4, 2023 Updated 16 hrs ago (SFExaminer.com)
We’ve all felt it — that moment when you fall in love with The City, when it becomes a part of you. The late Tony Bennett gave us an unforgettable song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” about the phenomenon.
It happened to Elon Musk on a Saturday in July after a giant and apparently illegal “X” sign went up on top of the headquarters of the company formerly known as Twitter.
“San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, though others forsake you, we will always be your friend,” Musk posted on X, which is what he’d recently renamed the San Francisco company he bought for $44 billion last year.
It’s a marked change in tune for Musk, who has decried San Francisco’s rough streets and unhoused population, calling The City a “derelict zombie apocalypse.”
Now, Musk is urging other employers to come back to The City’s downtown and bring their workers with them. And he vowed not to move X headquarters out of San Francisco.
The X on the roof of the Market Street headquarters building didn’t last long. The sign came down Monday after drawing complaints from the Department of Building Inspection, neighbors who had the brightly lit symbol flashing in their windows all night, and X’s landlord.
Will Musk’s newfound loyalty to San Francisco endure?
Twitter was generous to its hometown, giving millions of dollars in corporate charity. Some of that was in exchange for a tax break for which it and other Mid-Market area companies were eligible.
Musk could make X’s corporate predecessor look chintzy. Heck, he could easily become The City’s biggest philanthropist. His Musk Foundation had $9.4 billion in assets as of the end of 2021, the last year for which it reported data, and he gave it another $2 billion last year. That’s more than Marc Benioff’s entire net worth.
Benioff has given more than $100 million to Bay Area schools over the past decade. Musk has given far more modestly, and his foundation reported mostly small grants to school systems, largely in south Texas near the location of a launch site for SpaceX, another of his companies. (According to its sparse website, science and engineering education is a priority.)
Once the Musk Foundation starts giving the 5% of its assets a year that the tax code requires — that would be roughly $570 million, including the more recent donations Musk made — it would instantly launch into the top 10 largest grantmakers, according to The Grantsmanship Center, ahead of Bay Area philanthropic institutions like the Hewlett and Packard foundations.
It’s no secret that the area around X’s Market Street headquarters is a pulsing heart of need. One-third of the Tenderloin’s residents live below the poverty line, and it’s also host to many of The City’s burgeoning open-air drug markets.
Amid Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter, the company abandoned the NeighborNest community hub, which provided internet access and child care to unhoused parents.
Erica Kisch, the executive director of Compass — the nonprofit that operated the NeighborNest for Twitter — is still optimistic, despite not hearing anything from her former corporate partner in the months since Musk’s takeover.
“We would hope that, like the previous incarnation of the company, they would be excited and motivated to make a strong commitment to the social needs of the community,” Kisch told me.
“A high-visibility company like [X] could really move the needle with strong messaging to counteract all the very negative messaging that is flying about The City,” she said.
If Musk were to engage more with the community, he’d have the support of his district supervisor, Matt Dorsey — who, in some cosmic irony, did PR for a startup called X.com run by a young entrepreneur named Elon Musk during the dot-com boom. (Musk, who has long been fascinated by the rare one-letter domain name, used it for an online banking company that became PayPal and bought back the domain from that company in 2017.)
“I want to be supportive of X as a large employer because I am supportive of the Mid-Market neighborhood,” Dorsey told me.
But the sign incident bothered Dorsey because it “struck me as trolling The City.” He anticipates The City will fine X for the unpermitted construction.
On the other hand, Dorsey applauded Musk’s declaration that he was keeping X in San Francisco.
“I appreciate that he’s not giving up on our city; I think that’s good news,” he said. “I’d like to extend an olive branch.”
X, too, seems to be slowing its troll. Instead of a poop emoji, which is what I got the last time I asked the company a question through its press inbox, I got a promise that I’d hear back from it soon.
I haven’t gotten an answer about X’s plans to give back. But staying put is a good first step. And for the rest? Once San Francisco gets in your heart, it’s there for good.
