Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is purportedly “in talks” to move the social media empire’s incorporation papers to the Lone Star State, leaving Delaware in the dust, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) said on Friday.
Meta Platforms are mulling moving the company's legal papers from their current home in Deleware – known for its business-friendly tax structure and protective corporate legal system – to Texas or to possibly another state, the WSJ said in an exclusive report.
According to a Meta spokesperson, the social media giant’s corporate headquarters will remain in Menlo Park, in California’s Silicon Valley, with no future plans to move.
Apparently, the decisions between Texas and Meta came before President Trump was elected to the Oval Office for his second term, people familiar with the talks told the Journal.
The company is said to be considering the pros and cons of legal setups outside the state and how other companies fared when they reincorporated, the WSJ reported.
Texas has been touting itself as a better environment for large corporations beholden to their shareholders.
The potential move would come barely a year since Elon Musk reincorporated his SpaceX and Tesla companies in Texas, some say a knee-jerk reaction to the Tesla court battle over his $56 million dollar compensation package that was shut down by a Deleware judge.
Musk had already moved Tesla’s corporate headquarters from the Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas in 2021, with the EV car-maker’s engineering offices still in the valley.
In 2024, Space X not only moved its incorporation from Delaware but also moved its headquarters from California to be next to its Starbase rocket launch pad in Boca Chica, near Brownsville, Texas.
Last February, Musk additionally reincorporated his brain tech startup Neuralink from Deleware to Nevada, although its physical headquarters have remained in California.
Earlier this month, Meta announced it would relocate its trust and safety content moderators from California to Texas, although some ex-workers claimed afterward that the teams had already been in Texas and Zuckerberg was only trying to appeal to Trump. These are not to be confused with Meta’s fact-checking teams, which the platform disbanded earlier this month.
About two-thirds of S&P 500 companies—regardless of where they are actually based—are incorporated in Delaware, the news outlet noted.
Meta has been incorporated in Deleware since 2004, going public in 2012.
Ironically, in July 2024, Meta forked over $1.4 billion to Texas, settling a 2022 lawsuit accusing its social media platform, Facebook, of capturing the biometric information of millions of Texans without their consent using its facial-recognition technology.
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