Well Houston has a massive space industry too (hence why they call it "space city"). My thought has always been that he's been becoming more frustrated with CA for many years, but he just moved from SF to LA, and now he's moving From LA to Austin and Starbase, when (in my mind) it would make more sense to build and design the starlink satellites (among other things) in Houston where the space industry is much stronger.

You do bring up a good point about JPL being in LA, which would certainly have been why he originally started SpaceX there. That used to be the only focus of the company. I was thinking more about starlink just because that's what the article focuses on (among a few other things)