Read It: The Spiteful 3-Word Tweet That Cost California Liberals Up to $100 Billion and Elon Musk
A week after Elon Musk and his company SpaceX made stock market history, a six-year-old social media post from a leading California liberal should be making the Golden State shudder.
On June 11, SpaceX went public, bringing in a staggering $75 billion — the largest amount of money in history, by far, for an initial public offering, as NPR reported.
It not only made Musk the world’s first trillionaire, but also brought new attention to the fact that Musk and his operations were invited very strongly to leave California six years ago by a Democratic lawmaker — an invitation Musk accepted.
Back in 2020, as The Hill reported at the time, Musk was publicly furious about the extent of California’s lockdown policies amid COVID. He threatened to move the headquarters of Tesla — his electric car company — out of the state.
Any sane politician, seeing the potential that a huge employer — not to mention a generational genius — was considering leaving, would have fought tooth and nail to find a way to prevent that from happening.
But Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, then a member of the California Assembly, had a different take.
A Democrat — naturally — she responded with a three-word post on the platform then known as Twitter that could well be the most expensive social media post in history.
“F*ck Elon Musk,” she wrote.
(Somewhat to her credit, she did use the asterisk.)
F*ck Elon Musk.
— Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (@LorenaSGonzalez) May 10, 2020
Since Musk didn’t become the richest man in history by being stupid, he got the point.
Message received
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2020
“Message received,” he wrote in response.
And boy, was it. Musk moved Tesla production facilities from California to Texas, and in October 2021, he announced that the company’s headquarters would be moving, too.
In 2024, he moved SpaceX and X — the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that he purchased in 2022 — to Texas from their California homes.
And with those companies went unimaginable wealth — in taxes the businesses paid, in economic activity their employees generated, in all the ways a free people choose to use their hard-earned income.
“This single tweet cost California hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes, revenue, and jobs,” investment banker and author John LeFevre wrote in an X post on Friday as the SpaceX IPO dominated headlines.
This single tweet cost California hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes, revenue, and jobs: pic.twitter.com/eXwbX4gi1l
— John LeFevre (@JohnLeFevre) June 12, 2026
Taking LeFevre’s estimate at its most conservative, California’s rapaciously tax-addicted government is losing out on $100 billion thanks to Musk’s departure — a departure California’s remaining taxpayers can thank Gonzalez Fletcher for.
Gonzalez Fletcher has left the California Assembly, but she’s still in public life as president of the California Federation of Labor Unions. That means she’s still in a position to do serious damage to the state’s economy.
And LeFevre wasn’t the only one who recalled her words:
Still the most costly tweet in CA history. Nice job, Lorena.
— Jon Love 🇺🇲 (@JLSearch) June 12, 2026
Wow. This tweet cost CA a LOT of money.
— Morning Glory 🇺🇸🌼🇺🇸 (@DoryBeutel) June 13, 2026
So the most costly tweet ever and still climbing. Great job! You are peak retard.
— Bastiat is my homeboy (@stevenfellows) June 13, 2026
Coincidentally, $100 billion is the same amount supporters of California’s proposed “billionaires tax” say it would raise if it advances to the ballot and passes in a referendum in November.
That tax would put a levy of 5 percent on the net worth of Californians whose assets exceed $1 billion.
Maybe if California’s liberal leaders weren’t so hellbent on driving away wealth creators, they might not have to be so fixated on taxing the billionaires who are foolish enough to stay within their reach.
But Elon Musk is clearly nobody’s fool.
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