A quick post here as I just heard that Elon Musk is moving his Tesla headquarters to Texas. As someone that is (sort of) orginally from Texas, it of course makes me happy to hear this news as it was whrn Joe Rogan (the moset popular podcaster, ever) did the same.

A lot of companies have left California in the last few years. Hewlett Packard, oracle, are among some of the larget. What confueses me though is not that people like Rogan and Musk are moving out of California, but to where in Texas they are moving.

They’re leaving California for carious reasons: taxes and regulation being high on the list as well, as, well, llok at the state of the big cities there’s also the cost of housing which has been outrageous in California forever (I lived there in 1978-81 and houses were almost out of reach for working families then).

Whats odd is moving to Austin., Think of Austin as a mini-California. Sure, there’s no state income tax in Texas, and they are very business friendly (like Florida) but the politics if Austin is basically no different than California as a whole. Yes, Austin, a year ago, voted to ”defund the police”, reducing the budget of the police by millions and in effect, losing the people necessary to protect yes you, Joe, and Elon.

So these people have left progressive California for progressive Austin, and pretty much the only thing they’ve swapped is state income taxes. Homeless? You can look that one up but Austin’s is no better than Los Angeles. Here’s the latest I could find for Austin demographics. Of course housing is a lot cheaper than in California, but Austin is one of the most expensive cities to live in the U.S.

No, I’m not really dissing my home state, just wondering why it always seems to be ”Austin” for celebs of sorts. Of course it makes sense that the lifestyle would be familiar and therefore, unlike Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio, feel more familiar. It’s all good to me because it means jobs in Texas (Tesla, HP, Oracle) and that’s not a bad thing. What;s really bad? California refuse to see the train headed straight for them.