Californians Could Ruin Texas—But Not the Way You Might Think

[Elderberry]

Texas Monthly March 2021 Issue

Californians Could Ruin Texas—But Not the Way You Might Think

Some 16,000 years ago, one theory holds, Homo sapiens crossed the Bering Strait and swiftly migrated down the West Coast of North America. Eventually, descendants of those early humans found their way to Texas, encountering camels, ancient bison, and giant armadillos. “Californians!” the critters probably grumbled. “There goes the neighborhood.”

The latest flash point in the seemingly never-ending conflict between Texas natives and new arrivals comes courtesy of another coterie of Californians, most notable among them superstar podcaster Joe Rogan and eccentric billionaire Elon Musk. Rogan relocated last August, saying he felt Los Angeles had become overcrowded, though he might also have been induced to move by Texas’s lack of a state income tax. (He had recently inked a $100 million deal with Spotify.) Musk, who in January briefly seized the title of richest man on the planet, had threatened to move Tesla out of the Bay Area in the early months of the pandemic, following a dispute with county officials over his refusal to keep its Fremont factory closed as a COVID-19 precaution. Just a few months after announcing that Austin had won the bidding for a new Tesla facility, he revealed in December that he had moved to Texas to be closer to it and his other prominent enterprise, SpaceX, in Boca Chica.

Around the time of Musk’s splashy declaration, tech giant Oracle unveiled plans to relocate its headquarters from Redwood City, California, to a new campus in Austin, and IT hardware and services company Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced a move from San Jose, California, to Houston. Then, in January, financial services multinational corporation Charles Schwab designated its Denton County facility as its headquarters, a shift from its former San Francisco location. Folks from all across the country have been moving to Texas, of course. But the Californian trend seems to be accelerating, as does local anxiety about it.

The nearly 700,000 Californians who have relocated here since 2010 loom large in the Texan imagination because they come from the only state richer and more populous than Texas, and the only one next to whom the Lone Star State can play the underdog. And many of the Californian transplants who grab headlines do so because they are loud—almost as loud as the powerful Texans boasting of their arrival. Prominent Silicon Valley departees describe their “exodus” in urgent, ideological terms. Joe Lonsdale, the cofounder of the surveillance behemoth Palantir, who recently moved with his smaller venture firm to Austin, declared that like-minded others must “make a stand together for a free society” after years of suffering in closed-minded, groupthinking California. (There are, however, some categories in which Texas cannot compete: Oracle chair Larry Ellison won’t be relocating with his company, instead remaining on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, where he owns 98 percent of the land.)

Though they may use the novel corporate-speak endemic to Silicon Valley, these tech “refugees” are part of a long tradition of iconoclasts and misfits seeking an idealized future in Texas. The state has long been a canvas upon which outsiders project their hopes and dreams. Davy Crockett and other Americans were “gone to Texas” in the early nineteenth century; in the middle of that century, German “forty-eighters” sought to build a liberal future in the Hill Country, and European socialists set up camp at La Réunion, near Dallas.

More: https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/californians-could-ruin-texas-but-not-the-way-you-might-think/