The gradually worsening circumstances of life in formerly beautiful California continued. Native Californians and long-term residents were fleeing the many failures of the state’s gross mismanagement in droves. The imbalance of California’s outgoing migrants and incoming migrants causes U-haul and Ryder moving truck rental to have to pay drivers to return their moving trucks back to California, so they can rent them to still more residents escaping the state’s problems.
The US Census in 2020 showed that the State of California had lost so many residents that California had to surrender one of their 53 seats in the House of Representatives.
The flow of large and sophisticated Fortune 500 companies moving away was becoming a torrential flood. They were figuratively racing each other to get out, while the getting was good.
To a normal person all of this might have been a warning sign that the governor and the legislature should back off of their aggressive agenda of climatic idealism and regulatory zeal for a little while in order to save the state. However California’s governor Gruesome and his army of pocket minions in the state legislature thought otherwise. He and his righteous regiment in Sacramento chose to double down on their programs and seize even more control from the people of the state.
Nothing short of directing every area of life and thought will be good enough for them. Only complete perfection in every detail of their multifaceted plans could make this bed “just right” for Goldilocks.
Newsom declared war on anything burning hydrocarbons, from your backyard barbeque, to your lawn mower, to your automobile.
He also proclaimed himself and the State of California to be above Federal Law and above the US Constitution, and when he officially nullified any national law he did not personally agree with, as John C. Calhoun and the state of South Carolina had done in America’s First Nullification Crisis, in 1832. It didn’t end well for South Carolina then, and it won’t end well for California this time.
The Number of California Residents Fleeing to Other States Increases Dramatically
According to the published US Census Bureau data the net number of people leaving California increased dramatically. In the preceding 10 years form 2010 to the end of 2019, the population of California fell by a total of 1,245,570 people. That is an annual average of 124,557 people per year.
In the period from 2021 to the end of 2024, the four years that the Census bureau has published data for, the population of California decreased by 1,271,913 people. That means that for those four years the average annual net rate of departures was 317,978 people per year. That’s over two and a half times more Californians feeling each year than was seen in the previous 10 year period.
In October 2023, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research found that California was “hemorrhaging residents to neighboring states like Texas, Arizona, and Nevada” at “higher levels than ever before“, across all income levels, but especially among college graduates. The causes of the change may be subject to debate, but their galvanizing effect is beyond challenge: Californians are emigrating from California.
Clearly there is a Great California Exodus underway, and there is no sign that it is slowing down.
There Has Also Been a Flood of Large Fortune 500 Companies Exiting California
The difficult decision to leave California is neither a partisan nor political choice. Large Fortune 500 level companies do not make a decisions to move their operations lightly. Such moves are expensive, time consuming and fraught with an endless stream of technical difficulties. Nobody really wants to start that ball rolling. It’s the result of a detailed analysis of the math, of the fiduciary responsibility, and of the competitive reality of the business environments in different locations.
So why do profitable companies with deep California roots chose to relocate their operations to other states. The answer is their costs can drop by 30–50% essentially overnight. That’s not a small factor. It is a compelling reality. Moreover, competitive business-friendly states make almost everything much easier of the business they are seeking to attract. It not just a financial move. It’s the whole package.
In 2020
Oracle (Larry Ellison) – from Santa Clara, CA –> Austin, TX (December, 2020), and then on to Nashville, TN in 2024) – Oracle is a computer technology giant which sells a wide range of products and services, including database software, enterprise applications, cloud infrastructure, and hardware. Their offerings include solutions for enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and various cloud services.
“Nashville is a fabulous place to live,” Ellison said, according to an Associated Press report. “It’s a great place to raise a family. It’s got a unique and vibrant culture …. It’s the center of the industry we’re most concerned about, which is the health care industry.”
In 2025 Oracle employed 162,000 people and its revenue that year was 16.06 billion dollars.
CBRE is a global real estate company which maintained its headquarters in Los Angeles, California. As a commercial real estate specialist, CBRE monitors the number of companies leaving California and the reasons which are motivating them to leave. Those fact convinced CBRE that it too needed to leave the state.
In 2020, CBRE moved its headquarters to Dallas, Texas. CBRE directly employs 140,000 people and in 2025 it had a total revenue of 39.33 billion dollars.
Palantir Technologies Inc. (stock symbol: PLTR) is an American publicly traded company that develops data integration and analytics platforms enabling government agencies, military operations, and corporations to combine and analyze data from multiple sources. Its flagship products—Gotham (for intelligence and defense) and Foundry (for commercial and civil use)—connect previously siloed databases to support intelligence operations, counterterrorism analysis, law enforcement, and enterprise analytics.
Palantir was founded in 2003, in Palo Alto, California by Peter Thiel, Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, Alex Karp, and Nathan Gettings. In 2020 Palantir moved its headquarters to Denver, Colorado. Palantir directly employs 3,936 people and in 2025 its total revenue was 4.48 billion dollars.
8VC (Venture Capital) was founded in 2015 with headquarters located in San Francisco, California.
In 2020 8VC left California and moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas. It employs 202 people. Its 1 billion dollars of assets produce an average revenue of 15 million dollars a year.
2021
Tesla, Incorporated (stock ticker symbol: TSLA) is an American multinational automotive and clean energy company. It designs, manufactures, and sells battery electric vehicles (BEVs), stationary battery energy storage devices from home to grid-scale, solar panels and solar shingles, and related products and services.
Tesla Motors, Inc. was founded in 2003, in Palo Alto, California by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. They served as chief executive officer and chief financial officer, respectively. Eberhard said that he wanted to build “a car manufacturer that is also a technology company,” with its core technologies as “the battery, the computer software, and the proprietary motor.”
In 2004 Elon Musk bought a majority share in Tesla for 6.5 million dollars and he has been its majority shareholder ever since. In December 2021 Tesla moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas. In 2025 Tesla directly employed 134,785 people and their total revenue that year was 94.83 billion dollars.
AECOM (stock ticker symbol: ACM) is a large scale multinational infrastructure design, engineering, management and consultancy firm. AECOM is an abbreviation for Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Operations, and Management. AECOM provides Archaeology, Architecture & Design, Urban Planning, Landscape Architecture, Asset Management, Construction, Cost Management, Decommissioning & Closure, Economics, Engineering, Environmental Services, International Development, IT & Cyber Security, Operations & Maintenance, Planning & Consulting, Program Management/Construction Management, Risk Management & Resilience and Technical Services.
AECOM Established its headquarters in Los Angeles in 1990; however the collapsing business situation in California caused it leave that state and move its headquarters to Dallas, Texas in 2021. AECOM left Los Angeles, saying that Texas offered more benefits. A company spokesperson told The LA Times, “Dallas has emerged as a US hub for corporate headquarters and a compelling corporate talent magnet, particularly among our peers and public companies in the engineering and consulting sectors.”
AECOM directly employees some 51,000 people and in 2025 AECOM’s total revenue was 16.14 billion dollars.
FICO (Fair Isaac Corporation) is a financial data analytics firm which is primarily focused on credit scoring services. It was founded by Bill Fair and Earl Isaac in 1956. The two men met while working at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. They were originally based in San Rafael, California. Working together in the pre-digital age they were able assemble enough open source data and information to compile a consumer credit scoring system. Selling its first credit scoring system two years after the company’s creation, FICO pitched its system to fifty American lenders. Its FICO score, a measure of consumer credit risk, has become a fixture of consumer lending in the United States.
In 2021 FICO quietly moved its corporate headquarters from the adversarial business environment of San Jose, California to the business-friendly environment of Bozeman, Montana.
FICO employees 3,811 people and in 2025 their total revenue steam was 2.06 billion dollars.
Landsea Holding Corporation (stock ticker symbol: LSEA) is a land developer and new home builder. They were originally located in Irvine, California. In 2023 they moved their headquarters to Dallas, Texas. They employ 556 people and in 2025 their total revenue was $1.57 billion dollars.
Then Comes 2022 and Newsom Blames Those He Has Already Victimized
Now here is where it gets interesting. Newsom’s team tries to spin this as a tax issue. They say these companies are just chasing lower taxes, as if that’s some kind of moral failing. But, that’s a deliberate misrepresentation. Yes, taxes matter. California has the highest state income tax in the nation, topping out at 13.3%. Add that to the top federal tax bracket rate of 37% and high earners are losing more than half their incomes. But taxes are only part of the equation.
Fortune 500 Executives Keep Looking at Their Options
What really drives companies out is the combination of high taxes and low value. If you are paying premium prices, you expect premium services. You expect roads that don’t have pot holes. You expect a power grid that doesn’t fail every summer. You expect permitting processes that take weeks, not years. You expect a government that treats businesses as partners not enemies.
California fails on everyone of those fronts, and it’s not because the state is poor. California has a budget surplus in 2022 of nearly a hundred billion dollars. That’s more than the entire GDP of most counties. So the money is there. The problem is how it is being spent (and probably whose pockets it is lining ?).
Instead of fixing the grid, the state pours billions into a high speed rail project that is decades behind schedule and billions over budget. Instead of addressing homelessness with solutions that actually work, the state throws money at programs that enable addiction and create dependency. Instead of cutting regulations that strangle businesses, the state adds more.
Longstanding, California Based Companies Can’t Take It Anymore
In 1939, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) was founded in Palo Alto, California and it maintained its headquarters there until 2022. Hewlett Packard Enterprise sells a range of products and services focused on enterprise technology, including servers, storage solutions, networking equipment, software, and consulting services. Their offerings are designed to support businesses in areas like cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and hybrid IT infrastructure.
In 2022 HPE announced it was leaving California, and moving to the Houston suburb of Spring, Texas: “Houston is also an attractive market for us to recruit and retain talent, and a great place to do business,” CEO Antonio Neri said in a statement announcing the move. Neri praised HPE’s new home in Spring, Texas (a Houston suburb), but stressed that the company was not leaving Silicon Valley entirely. “Our San Jose campus will remain a hub for technological talent and innovation,” he said.
In 2025 HPE directly employed some 67,000 people and its total revenue that year was 34.3 billion dollars.
Next Comes 2023 – Newsom & His Gang Make Things Even Worse
The situation accelerates. By now the flight of escapees is undeniable. But instead of course correcting, Newsom’s administration announces new taxes! A wealth tax proposal (a net worth excise tax) surfaces in the state legislature. It doesn’t pass, but the message is sent, that if your successful in California we’re coming for you. In late 2025 that wealth tax is placed on the California ballot for the November 2026 mid-term elections, and if passed it will be retroactive to anyone how hasn’t fled California before the end of 2025.
At the same time the state imposes a new gross receipts tax on businesses nominally to fund the states homeless hobo programs. Gross receipts are NOT profits! That means even if your business is losing money you still owe the tax. Think about that for a moment, you could be laying off workers, cutting costs, barely keeping the lights on and California still wants a piece of your revenue.
For Fortune 500 companies with sophisticated finance teams and access to top legal counsel the math is simple. They run the models. They compare the cost of staying versus the cost of leaving and increasingly the cost of staying is higher, not just financially, but operationally.
There’s the concept in business called predictability. Companies can handle high costs if those costs are stable and predictable. What they can’t handle is unpredictability. California has become the land of uncertainty. Will there be blackouts next summer? Will there be new mandates, next quarter? Will the legislature pass a wealth tax? Will the governor declare another emergency, and impose new restrictions? No one knows.
In This Environment the Only Rational Decision is to Leave
Kelly-Moore Paints was an American paint manufacturing company. Founded in 1946 by William Kelly and William Moore in San Carlos, California, it moved its headquarters from there to Irving, Texas, in 2023. In 2323 Kelly-Moore has 1,200 employees, and revenue of $450 M.
Wiley X was originally founded as Protective Optics in 1987 by U.S. Army Veteran Myles Freeman Sr. Wiley X is an advanced eye protection (UV protection) company founded in Livermore, California. Their stated mission is to “build the world’s best protective eyewear.” In 2023 they left California and moved their headquarters to the Dallas suburb of Frisco, TX.
As of 2025 Wiley X employees 142 people and in 2025 its total revenue was 250 million dollars.
Inbenta Technologies is an AI automation company that originated in Barcelona, Spain, in 2005; however it soon established its headquarters in Foster City, California. Inbenta provides natural language processing and semantic search automation systems through so called artificial intelligence. In 2023 Inbenta’s new chief executive officer Melissa Solis moved Inbenta’s headquarters to the Dallas suburb of Allen, Texas.
Inbenta employees 192 people and in 2024 its total revenue was 53.3 million dollars.
Thermonix USA is a kitchen appliance manufacturer which was originally headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California. In 2023 they left California and moved to Dallas, Texas. They have around 170 employees and in FY 2025 they enjoyed a revenue of 80.4 million dollars.
Informativ, formerly known as Credit Bureau Connection, was founded in 1962, in Woodland Hills, California, in the San Fernando Valley region outside of Los Angeles. It offers credit-focused lead generation, credit report and compliance solutions to the automotive and general consumer finance industries across the United States. Their products and services include proactive fraud prevention, compliance, credit reporting, customer insights, digital showroom, and “smart pencil” (deal contract writing) solutions company.
In January of 2023 Informativ moved its headquarters to the Dallas area suburb of Frisco, Texas. Informativ employees 91 people and in 2025 its total revenue was 5 million dollars.
QuickFee U.S. (a subsidiary of QuickFee Solutions, Australia) is a financial technology company which specializes in rapid accounts receivable collections and management, and which was headquartered in Los Angeles, California.
In 2023 QuickFee US moved its headquarters to Plano, Texas. In 2023 it employed 73 people and in 2025 its total revenue was 5.3 million dollars.
2024
Chevron Corporation, is the second largest survivor of John D. Rockefeller’s iconic Standard Oil Company which began operations in California 1875. The Standard Oil Company of California was founded in 1879 when oil was discovered north of Los Angeles. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was fragmented for monopolistic business practices by a US Supreme court decision in 1911. The Standard Oil Company of California was then made independent of the former parent company. In 1984 it changed its name to Chevron Corporation. Chevron was headquartered in San Francisco, until 2001, when it moved its headquarters to San Ramon, California. Those deep roots made it tough for Chevron to leave California.
“While our relocation has very real benefits to our business, we also believe California policymakers have pursued policies that raise costs and consumer prices, creating a hardship for all Californians, especially those who can least afford it,” Ross Allen, a spokesperson for Chevron, said in a statement to Business Insider. “These policies have also made California investment unappealing compared with opportunities elsewhere in the US and globally.”
In 2024 Chevron Corporation was finally forced by events to move its headquarters and operations to Houston, Texas. As of 2025 Chevron has 45,298 people working directly for them and its total revenue in 2025 was 187.03 billion dollars.
SpaceX is a privately held American company which designs and operates a reusable rocket-based launch vehicle, the Falcon 9 system. SpaceX launches private, commercial, government, and military satellites into low-earth orbits. It also launches and operates man-carrying space craft, the Dragon 1 capsule. Since 2012 the Dragon 1 craft have been routinely re-supplying the International Space station.
SpaceX has also spawned a global satellite cell phone and internet access network called Starlink which relies on an enormous constellation of hundreds (soon to be thousands) of satellites.
Since 2015, the company has been routinely re-landing its Falcon 9 booster rockets and reusing them.
SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk in 2002, in Hawthorne, California and used the Missile launch pads at Vandenberg Air Force Base as it primary launch pads.
In 2024 the SpaceX operation to a location on the gulf coast of Texas near the city of Brownsville. The new headquarters is now located there, at Starbase, Texas.
In announcing SpaceX’s relocation, Musk singled out a California law that forbids schools from requiring staff to inform parents of a student’s gender identity concepts. “This is the final straw,” Musk wrote on X in July 2024. “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.”
As of 2025 SpaceX has 10,088 people working directly for them and in that year their total revenue was 11.8 billion dollars.
X/Twitter was released for public use in July of 2006, and it was incorporated in 2007 with its headquarters located in San Francisco. It was started as a short SMS text message service; however its functions have been increased to longer messages, micro-blogging, and social networking services.
In October of 2022 Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it “X.” Prior to Musk’s purchase of Twitter it had been controlled by agents of the US government (along with all the other larger US social media companies), and the government agents actively censored the political content of posts on Twitter. That dark practice was eliminated to some degree by Mr, Musk who also released and published The Twitter Files which verified the government’s politically biased and constitutional illegal, intrusive actions.
In September of 2024 Musk moved X’s headquarters to Bastrop, Texas. X employs 2840 people and its 2025 revenue was 2 billion dollars.
Ruiz Foods is an American food production and service company which was founded in 1964 by Louis Ruiz and his son, Fred. As of April 2010, it was the top seller of frozen Mexican dishes in the US and Canada. Under the brand names of El Monterey and Tornados it produces around 200 frozen Mexican foods for grocery stores throughout the US and Canada. These foods include burritos, taquitos, enchiladas, and tamales.
In 2024 The management of Ruiz Foods moved its headquarters to the Dallas area suburb of Frisco, Texas. Ruiz Foods employs over 4,000 people and last year its total revenue was 593.8 million dollars.
Neutrogena, the well-known cosmetics and beauty products company had been in California since it was founded in 1930 as a supplier to the stars, which was headquartered in Los Angeles, near Hollywood. In 1994 Neutrogena was sold to Johnson and Johnson’s consumer healthcare products division, Kenvue. In 2024 Kenvue uprooted Neutrogena and moved it out of California to a new global headquarters located in Summit, New Jersey.
As of 2024, 22,000 people worked for Kenvue and in 2025 their total revenue was 15.01 billion dollars.
2025
Realtor.com is a real estate listings website operated by the News Corp subsidiary Move, Inc. It is the second most visited real estate listings website in the United States as of 2021, with over 100 million monthly active users. It was founded in 1995 in San Jose, California. News Corp is primarily owned by the Rupert Murdoch family. News Corp CEO Robert Thompson said the media giant was “proud” of the online real estate company’s home. The conglomerate, which also owns Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, operates Realtor.com through a subsidiary, Move, Inc.
On February 10, 2025, it was reported that Realtor.com had relocated its headquarters from Santa Clara to Austin, Texas. “Austin and Texas offer a strong and growing talent pool, a powerhouse economy with unparalleled housing growth, affordability of living only matched by its aspirational lifestyle, expansive tech and academic communities, and a dynamic and vibrant city at the heart of the thriving state of Texas. There is no better place for us to call home,” CEO Damian Eales said in a statement. “We are proud to be housed in a state which understands the crucial role played by business in providing opportunities for personal growth, professional success, and community achievement,” Thompson said in a statement.
In 2025, Realtor.com had 3,270 people working for them and in that same year their total revenue was 640.9 million dollars.
Playboy Group, Incorporated’s parent company was founded as Playboy Magazine by Hugh Hefner in 1953. It is an American global media and lifestyle company which was later taken public as Playboy Enterprises, Inc. (stock ticker symbol: PLBY). PLBY oversees the Playboy magazine and related assets. The company is focused on four primary business lines: sexual wellness, style & apparel, gaming and lifestyle, and beauty & grooming products.
Its headquarters (and Hugh Hefner’s “bachelor pad”) were located in Los Angeles, California up until 2025, when PLBY Group, Inc., relocated to Miami Beach, Florida. “Miami Beach is among the most dynamic and culturally influential cities in the country, making it the ideal home for Playboy’s next chapter,” CEO Ben Kohn said in a statement. In an interview with Fox News, Kohn said “it was too difficult to keep doing business in California,” and that “Given Florida and Miami’s pro-business stance, leaving California, which is anti-business and a very difficult place to do business as an employer, we’re excited to be relocating to Miami Beach, and the city of Miami Beach has been phenomenal and helpful in the move,” Kohn told the outlet.
As of 2024 PLBY Group had 615 people working directly for them and in 2025 its total revenue was 119.51 million dollars.
2026
Leprino Foods is a private family food producer which makes most of Mozzarella cheese in America. It was founded in 1950, and its headquarters are located in Denver Colorado. It is set to close its Lemoore East facility in California in early 2026. Their closure will result in the loss of 368 jobs. The decision was influenced by high operating costs of the unfriendly business environment in California and the opening of a new facility in Texas.
Conclusion
Fortune 500 companies generally have very bright and wise people managing them. It is a tragedy for any one of these companies to have been forced by circumstances beyond their control to leave California. For the entire group of companies listed above to reached the same conclusions leads one to the inescapable fact that the State of California has been grossly mismanaged for an extended period of time.
The associate fact that over 2.5 million California residents independently reached the same conclusion further convicts the managers of the state of California of gross incompetence.
In the conclusion of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which he delivered to commemorate the battlefield of the same name, he admonished us that we survivors must:
“we highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Sadly it seams that despite his nominally good intentions Gavin Newsom and his gang seam to be determined to extinguish government of the people, by the people and for the people, forever.
