December 17, 2020 - 7:00am
Oracle is the world’s second biggest software company. It is also an anchor tenant of Silicon Valley — or rather it was. Last week, the company moved its HQ from California to Texas. Meanwhile, Oracle’s legendary founder, Larry Ellison, will be working from home, which in his case is the Hawaiian island of Lanai (most of which he owns).
Oracle isn’t the first tech giant to walk away. Elon Musk is also moving to Texas and taking Tesla’s company HQ with it. Peter Thiel has already expressed his frustration with Silicon Valley property prices — though has yet to quit California completely.
Perhaps the most painful loss is Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is also off to Texas. Silicon Valley can trace its origin back to a small garage in Palo Alto where Bill Hewlett and David Packard started their electronics business in the late 1930s.
So, what’s driving the evacuation?
Well, I’ve already mentioned the rent. Then, this year, there’s the impact of Covid. With so many people working from home, location is less important, so one might as well move somewhere more affordable. The social decay of Golden State — and especially San Francisco — is a further concern. Your corporate HQ might look nice in the California sunshine, but not against a background of mass homelessness and substance abuse.
Covid has devastated the state’s finances. A record breaking deficit holds out the promise of tax rises to come, and California’s personal income tax rate is already the highest of any state.
The exodus of big names risks becoming a self-propelling process. Each departure narrows the tax base while increasing the costs and eroding the advantages of staying behind. California desperately needs to stop this death spiral before it’s too late.
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SubscribeOne has to wonder if, as the tech giants relocate to Texas, they will take their politics with them and so transform Texas into the very thing they are so desperate to leave.
Like king Canute wondered if he could stop the tide.
Perhaps similar to the refugee migrants wishing to change our way of life to the way of life that they they escaped from in the first place.
This is how it works in Canada. We bring in miIIions of peopIe from the 3rd WorId, and when someone notices that our cuIture is becoming coarse and dangerous, the Progessives and media immediateIy caII them “racists”. Then the Progressive poIiticians teII these 3rd worId immigrants that onIy the IiberaI party Ioves them….and that the Conservative guys are aII racists, the immigrants spread that around. Soon, the Immigrant vote in Canada (Iike the bIack vote in the USA) is pretty much a Iock for the party who IabeIs the other guys racists.
During aII the huIabaIoo……no one in the media seems to notice that most of the crime, rape, murder, terrorism and mayhen in the streets are coming from the same peopIe we Iet in and gave sheIter.
Anyone who points it out….is again caIIed……any guesses?
It makes you feel sorry for Texas, nice people the Texans – wonderful hospitality. They don’t need this self serving hypocrisy importing itself from California.
You mean those nice good old boys who execute more people than any other state in the US (except of course the Federal Government at present!!)?
the people who are executed are known as criminals, having been convicted of some rather heinous acts. California has also had the occasional execution, and it recently had an AG who warehoused black men on petty drug charges.
What an incredibly misinformed stereotype of Texas and its people. And I say that as a Californian.
They’ll take the jobs though.
Peter Franklin tells us that:
“Every week brings a new story of woke tomfoolery.”
Some things happening in California are much more dangerous than mere “tomfoolery” or vain woke posturing. LA County recently elected a new DA in the person of one George Gascon (Soros funded by all accounts) who has plans to dramatically reduce punishment for a whole range of offences ““ even violent ones.
Victims of crime are alarmed by this development but the Left, needless to say, think this “social experiment” is a step in the right direction. I dare say the thinking behind it does not rise much above that old (rarely challenged) penal reformer’s trope: “Prison make bad people worse”
How long before the Left call for crime itself to be decriminialised?
this trend is occurring in other cities, too, such as Seattle or Portland, and like most toxic ideas, it is more likely to spread than not. There are elected officials who justify theft by painting the criminals as poor, woebegone poor people who can differentiate right from wrong.
Not always seen as quite so forlorn by everyone.
All too often in popular entertainment the criminal is an exciting anti-hero living out a grand drama while the law-abiding citizens are just dull little people who get in the way. Predators (human and animal) fascinate the researcher and dramatist alike while their prey are just boring old losers.
While we are on the subject let’s not forget those political theorists who find it useful to portray the criminal justice system as a form of oppression created by those with wealth and power for their own advantage.
Abiding by the law and defending yourself when attacked will be criminalized. Or as the song goes: “Just as every cop is a criminal/And all the sinners saints/As heads is tails/Just call me Lucifer/’Cause I’m in need of some restraint
What we have now in California are the conditions that lead to the ( disastrous ) French Revolution. The elites just can’t see how their excesses are fueling the rage against them. They are attempting to buy off and placate special interest groups with “favors and privileges” but the ordinary working people are fed up. Truly a ticking time bomb.
They don’t enforce shoplifting laws in SF. You can steal up to $950 in stuff, and just walk out the door. They don’t enforce loitering ordinances. It’s legal to poop on the sidewalk.
My grandparents moved from IL to CA (San Diego) in 1954 because property prices were SOOOOO CHEAAPPPPPP that you could buy a house for a song. They bought a small house for $35k. Today the house is going for $950K. Stunning.
The inability of liberal morons to actually understand that actions have consequences is astonishing.
It would appear that those liberal morons made your parents rich without them having to do anything more than buy a home. Boy are those liberals stupid!! Make people property millionaires! The scandal!
There have been countless articles and videos on this subject for a couple of years now. See Joel Kotkin and Inside California or whatever it’s called.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Newsom and co aren’t driving companies away on purpose. It means they can pay their friends in the Homeless Industrial Complex to house the vast numbers of homeless in the empty offices, all paid for by Federal bailouts.
The last sentence is lazy and would be better as:
‘For the moment though, will the last tech company to leave Silicon Valley please turn off the algorithm that suppresses conservative views?
Absolutely. The algorithm has converted “standard conservative view” into “hate speech”.
No doubt Texas will end up like California after the plague of locusts have finished.
Yes, that’s the problem. These people leave various states due to the inevitable consequences of Democrat/progressive policies (high taxes, social breakdown, high crime etc) then go elsewhere and vote Democrat, thus creating the same conditions in their new location.
Who knows? Perhaps this is a deliberate plan by the people who run California and New York to destroy Texas and Florida as well.
And Georgia, I’ve read.
Yes, and Virginia to a considerable extent.
Exactly what happened to Colorado. Inundated by California locusts.
I was raised in Colorado and moved with my family to California when I was 15. California in 1965 truly was “The Golden State”. Still, I always nurtured hopes of returning to Colorado. No more. As my older brother, who still lives in Littleton says, “Colorado is now just Eastern California”. UC Boulder is the eastern campus of UC Berkeley.
There used to be a popular bumper sticker in Colorado: “Don’t Californicate Colorado!”. You don’t see that bumper sticker anymore because it’s already happened.
California’s state income tax rate for high earners has effectively gone up by about 50% over the past couple of years when Trump ended federal deductions for state income taxes. The federal government was massively subsidizing spending in some of the wealthiest states in America which, I think, quite rightfully has stopped. California income tax rates are higher than those in the UK, i.e. European levels of taxation for third-world quality of services. That’s more than enough reason to move state.
It will be interesting to see if Biden tries to reverse the deductibility of state income taxes. A tax break for some of the richest people in the country might be a hard sell right now, though Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi both have their base in the California Democratic Party and their donors are the ones being hit by this.
With the filibuster in the Senate, I see no way for Biden to change tax policy. He has only one moment – at the beginning of the term, they can run a bill thru which has a simple majority approval. But Dems will not be controlling the Senate.
I strongly suspect that Dems will be controlling the Senate based on what I’m hearing out of Georgia, added to the usual Democrat voter fraud etc.
Neither Pelosi nor Harris will have problems with tax breaks for the wealthy. Schumer will love it. He is after all, a New Yorker.
Honest question. What does the Californian State Government spend all this tax on?
Public union pensions mostly. Plus don’t forget how many Californians do not pay federal or state taxes because they live in poverty. No state has more homeless and welfare recipients than California. Also, California has more illegal aliens than any other state and they have to be taken care of as well, healthcare costs, education, etc. So the people who can pay taxes have to pay a much higher rate. Then there’s all the green energy costs. In a state that can’t keep the lights on and the fires out.
No mention of the euphemism “demographic change” ” but that is to be expected.
California tech titans, whether left-wingers or so-called “libertarians” share a self-aggrandizing belief in the benefits and righteousness of easy immigration. During Silicon Valley’s rise to power the state’s Hispanic population has become a plurality.
Having imported a new people these geniuses then discovered how difficult it is having First World enterprises in a Third World country. So they are fleeing to Texas with their narcissistic ideologies intact, hoping that the Lone Star state has figured out how to make that combination work ” for them.
But once the Biden Wave of Central American peasants reinforces the already Hispanized Democratic Party in Texas, a party the tech oligarchs richly endow, the days of identity politics and conquistador socialists will come to Texas, along with the high taxes and social dysfunction that are its warp and woof.
That is the end-product of the Sixties-based, anti-white, soulless pseudo-religion these folks profess. Flight is their only response.
But hey! ” there’s always Montana!
It’s probably worth noting that when Texas fought for and gained its independent from Mexico it was largely a “Hispanized” area. Of course it was an Hispanic area for centuries before the white folks got there.
In Texas, Hispanics aren’t invaders Per Se, but often descendants of the original Texans, many families having roots that go back hundreds of years.
Of course the Hispanics in Texas were very ‘white’, without much native ancestry.
.How did the Tejanos become white? Unless you are referring to the Spaniards as white and the process of interbreeding with indigenous Mexicans.
Texas had been becoming whiter by the numbers as people like Austin and Houston got huge land grants from the Mexican Government and then sponsored settlers from the north to move south to Tejas. Around the time of Texas Independence People witha Mexican heritage were about 20% of the population. In 2010 the percentage is around 31%.
The point is that they did not “invade” Texas, they were Texas.
Only a portion of them were. And they didn’t start crossing the border in great numbers until Americans had developed the land into a very prosperous one. The same is true of Arizona, California, and perhaps New Mexico.
No, settlers from the US outnumbered those from Mexico by about ten to one when Texas gained its independence. And it wasn’t Hispanic for centuries before the white folks, it was Native American. “Hispanic” refers to the Spanish people, their language and culture. They’re just as European as English, regardless of what Woke ideologues tell us. The Native Americans had their own cultures, languages, etc.
Right Bill, that’s the problem… to many immigrants! Seriously, you really think that Musk and Ellison are moving to Texas because of … latinx immigrants? That’s hilarious. To … Texas? To get away from latin immigration? Wow.
No, Sidney, Musk and Ellison are moving to TX for the low taxes, courtesy of state legislators lead by governors like Abbott and Perry. As I said, they’re fine ” like all leftists and “libertarians” ” with Latinos and with immigration because the negative consequences don’t immediately affect them.
But just as governors Deukmejian and Wilson are irrelevant to today’s CA, so will those 2 TX governors be nothing more than fond memories soon, once the Biden Amnesty legalizes millions of Hispanics and turns the state blue. You do know that is the Democrats’ explicit plan, right? They say so all the time.
And after that is when Larry and Elon will start looking elsewhere again. That was my point. Sorry you missed it.
One hope to cling to is that the Hispanic vote is increasingly turning Red.
It’s a faint hope if you don’t have the kind of caudillo image ” big money, gaudy lifestyle, beautiful and silent wife ” that Trump exemplified for Hispanics, a personality in very short supply in the institutional GOP. (Josh Hawley? Tom Cotton? To apply the word macho to them is to guffaw.)
Democrats, on the other hand, have a much better record at turning out demagogues who can appeal to the descamisados.
I don’t know Bill. I live in an area with a large Hispanic presence and I’d say the opposite.
The values that I see on display seem to reflect a willingness to work hard, economic responsibility and conservative habits, and a very solid set of family values. And most are devout anti-abortion Catholics. Of course I can’t judge the entire US from my chair here, but these things lead me to believe that the Mexican immigrants are a good fit for conservative politics.
Most want the American dream, not some Low-rider Rap video version of it. Of course there may be a 20 year lead time before that becomes apparent because the young like any young people will run headfirst to the gaudy spectacle as you say, before they settle down.
I don’t know where to start, Steve. Let’s try reality.
The values you think make Mexicans a good fit for conservative politics is the story ” some would say “con” ” that the institutional, donor-driven Republican Party has been trying to sell conservative voters since the Simpson-Mazzoli Bill of 1986.
To many nice folks’ surprise that congruence hasn’t resulted in any Republican electoral victories. Instead, Hispanic immigration has been a major ” some say the major ” factor in once reliably Red states turning blue, such as CA, NM, CO and GA. Once red cities like Dallas (my home town) and Houston, too.
Also, their values don’t appear to correspond to those of conservatives in polling on issues like abortion (they favor it), criminal justice, support for BLM , taxes (they want them raised) and other litmus test issues ” exactly as you’d expect from their decades-long voting preference for the Democratic Party.
But one group has certainly benefited from a continuing flood of documented immigrants and illegal aliens from south of the border and that is the wealthy Republicans and “libertarians” who fund the think tanks which craft the narrative of “natural conservative” Latinos and the politicians who happily profess it. (“Immigration is an act of love,” said Jeb Bush.) Those who gain from cheap labor and who don’t have to deal the consequences in their neighborhoods and schools agree with your pleasant fantasy of “family values” Hispanics 100%.
I guess we non-Hispanic conservatives will just have to wait another 40 or 60 years for the values that you see in your neighbors from Mexico to translate into actual votes for conservative Republican candidates. I look forward to California voting for another Ronald Reagan. I just don’t know if there will still be a United States then.
But we can dream, can’t we?
And in the meantime, let’s definitely continue the historically unprecedented experiment in demographics that massive, unceasing immigration is on the national fabric of the United States. What could possibly go wrong?
After all, immigration mustn’t be stopped ” it’s not a government policy, it’s a Commandment.
“Californicating…”! The word deserves to live on as the perfect description of getting what you promoted, only to find you opened a Pandora’s Box that turned a stable society into a no man’s land of disintegrating common values.
If the left moves from state to state, destroying them all, one after the other, like a swarm of locusts, then the only possibility of any of them saving themselves is succession. I know it’s been tried, but that was to save slavery; this time it would be to avoid it.
Joe, for you, I’d recommend Kansas. Trickle down low taxes worked so well there!!
The ‘Deep South’! Having lived in every part of USA I can say the Deep South is the next California. It is not despoiled like Florida, and has lots of room, and a rather lovely riviera, great weather, and is kind of a blank slate the loony left would love to write on. Texas is getting full, Arizona too. Mobile is the silicon bayou next, it has Airbus and Mercedes and loads more.
I’ve lived in California since 1965. I have news for you. California’s day in the sun started to end the day Ronald Reagan left office as Governor of this state. Big tech and the titans of Silicon Valley merely accelerated the rot. Texas is about to learn a very hard lesson, as all these “woke” industrialists inflict their progressivist workforces and policies on that traditionally conservative state.
it’s surprising that people act surprised when frustrated folks eventually vote with their feet, often after realizing that elections really do have consequences.
One could almost feel sorry for the tech giants. Until, that is, you remember who it is that funds and votes for California’s political establishment.
And while some are busy moving to Texas, how many of them also voted for Biden on top of Newsom and of Gavin’s predecessors. They’re not objecting to the governance itself; they’re simply learning that unfettered one party rule never ends well.
The tax and other policies did not magically appear overnight. And it’s likely the next governor will be another version of Gavin. Meanwhile, as others have mentioned, there is the threat of people taking their voting habits to Texas along with jobs.
“the knowledge class migrating from one state to another ” Californicating its politics and society, and then moving on.”
Wrecking Texas like they wrecked California? Maybe Texas can work to discourage Leftist immigration as a Clear & Present Danger?
It isn’t Covid which has devastated the State’s finances, though it has made them worse, it’s the public service unions. California, like many Democrat one-party states and cities, is effectively bankrupt, with public service pension liabilities far beyond what they can afford. The unions demanded early retirement with generous pensions in return for bankrolling the Party, and selecting its policies and candidates. High taxes, energy and environmental policies, inflating property prices, and increasing lawlessness are driving away small businesses, and now larger ones, so the tax base is shrinking. These states and cities are banking on a federal bailout. If the Democrats don’t get the Senate these places are in big trouble.
Niall Ferguson and his family have also moved from the San Francisco Bay area, but to Montana somewhere. I suspect in their case, it was partly for security reasons, as Nialll’s wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is still facing death threats from Islamist lunatics.
Always struck me as odd that the ideas industry had to be located in a particular place; Tech in Silicon Valley, Finance in London, and so on. While the optimum place to build your PC is 5000 miles away.
Face-to-face interaction is the most productive way of developing ideas – arguing in front of a whiteboard.
And sometimes good ideas aren’t taken up by employers, resulting in those ideas-people setting up a new business next door.
At least, that is how many of the semiconductor/computer companies in silly valley came to be.
By the way, “Dealers of Lightning” is a great read on this topic. It’s about how a bunch of ideas came together at the Xerox Palo Alto research center in the early 1970s, ideas that have pretty much shaped the way that we interact with computers today.
Why odd?? Many of those industries “spun out” of Stanford University which generated much of the IPR to get these new tech industries going. Being next to high tech really does enable the transfer of research into practical products (or software).
Yes, it’s over for California. The latest outrage is that the state is planning to tax anyone, US citizen or not, who spends more than 60 days in the state. And even if you never set foot in California again, you’ll be taxed for a total of 10 years. Dumbest idea ever.
Isn’t this the plot of Atlas shrugged, except with the companies parasitizing society.
‘A horrible scenario therefore presents itself: the knowledge class migrating from one state to another ” Californicating its politics and society, and then moving on.’
Interesting. This is a stark example of capitalism and politics combining to enrich the few powerful entrepreneurs and disempower the rest of the population.
If a pig covered in shit runs out of the barn, up your front porch steps and into your house -and then jumps on the couch in your Iiving room……..it’s going to make your house stink as weII.
If these companies are fiIIed with Democrats, and onIy hire democrats….what state are they going to move to after ruining Texas?
I know that a lot of people like to hate California. I mean, what sore loser wouldn’t. Skiing, surfing, redwoods, Hollywood, Highway 1, Lake Tahoe, oil, gold, agriculture, Nobel laurates at world class universities, silicon valley, Yosemite Valley, volcanoes and deserts… top to bottom, no state can compete. Did I mention the good weather. It’s been postulated that many of the millions came in January after watching the Rose Bowl parade on t.v. while looking out the window at what they were living in.
So, to paraphrase Mark Twain, “Reports of the death of California have been greatly exaggerated.”. When I was born in California in 1948, there were fewer than 10 million there. Today, around 40,000,000. That Elon Musk, a brilliant but selfish narcissist just like Larry Ellison would want to leave the state after the state gave them the where-with-all to achieve what they’ve achieved should surprise no one. For some people, it’s always and only about themselves… and the benjamins. Good riddance. Stanford, Cal, Cal Tech, USC UCLA and many other State Universities will still produce creative geniuses, the weather will always be better than any other state, people will always want to live there, and the show will go on.
I know it’s tough… but this isn’t like hating the Pats or the Yankees or the Lakers… it’s built on enduring qualities that will always shine. Eat your hearts out.
Balderdash. I’ve lived in California since 1965, when it was arguably the best place in the nation to live. A state consists of more than great scenery and great weather for surfing. And when a state’s universities are given over to being leftist propaganda mills, they do more harm than good. ( And Californians are taxed to death to provide these incubators of progressivism. ) California – any state – is more, or less than the sum total of the things you enumerated. And the California of 2020 is becoming the armpit of the nation, culturally. With its pervasive political correctness, it is merely the vanguard of moral and intellectual decline.
I believe California has the most people getting some kind of welfare, the most poor supported by the most well off. A tipping point will be reached.
It also has the highest number of homeless.
Yes, and aside from defecating and urinating on the sidewalks and streets, I’ve read reports that bubonic plague has been found among them. You read that right, the so-called Black Death. (I don’t know about its next-of-kin, septicemic and pneumonic plagues). Not a cause for such optimism as Sidney shows above.
The mess on the streets is shocking. And I’m a New Yorker! The panhandling is really aggressive as well, it upset one of my kids really badly. We had to step over homeless if we left before the hotel doormen had moved them away from the doors. every time we left. Unless you live in gated community, it’s untenable,
Yes, it is a shame that you folks let the Leftists ruin your state, it was and is beautiful state.
I wouldn’t live there at this point. And I am not happy at all about your refugees spilling out to ruin the middle of the country.
You are wrong if you think, like so many Californians do, that the rest of us want to be you. We do not and we want you to stay a way from us.
California won’t let Musk operate his business. Why would you stay with the state trying to close you down?
True enough, the state is gorgeous which makes it doubly sad. Huge population boosted immensely by illegal immigration. Largest population of homeless in the entire country. Bravo.
How many of California’s millions of illegals and homeless are skiing and surfing? World class universities indeed, but how many people remain in the state after studying there? They’re likely smart enough not to. See it’s not producing the creative geniuses that matters so much, it’s keeping them. The pandemic has made clear that you don’t have to live in California to work for a California company.
Today California is a state with no middle class, it’s rich people behind gates and poor immigrants. But yes the weather is mostly good. Northern California not so much.