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Business Insider
10 hours ago
- Business Insider
These 11 companies have left California over the years
McKesson Corp. Pharmaceutical giant McKesson left California in 2019. In terms of public companies, only Apple loomed larger in the Bay Area. Then-CEO John H. Hammergren said that McKesson was moving its headquarters to Las Colinas, Texas (near Dallas) to "improve efficiency, collaboration and cost-competitiveness, while providing an exceptional work environment for our employees." Chevron Oil giant Chevron had deep roots in California, going back to the 1870s when an early predecessor discovered oil north of Los Angeles. That didn't stop the company from moving to Houston in 2024. Looking back on its move, the energy giant says that California's leaders have taken steps that made it "unappealing." "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." Tesla Like some of his fellow tech CEOs, Elon Musk grew frustrated with the limitations of the Bay area before Tesla left for Austin in 2021. "There's a limit to how big you can scale in the Bay Area," Musk said at the time. Before the move, Musk had also clashed with officials over keeping Tesla's Fremont, California, factory open despite COVID-19 orders. Oracle In 2020, Oracle left its longtime home in California. The computer technology giant isn't done moving yet. Last year, CEO Larry Ellison said the computer technology giant would move its headquarters from Austin, where it had been for less than half a decade, to Tennessee. "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." CBRE Global real estate company CBRE monitors the number of companies leaving California. The firm itself left Los Angeles in 2020. "Designating Dallas as CBRE's global corporate headquarters formalizes how our company has been operating for the past eight years," Lew Horne, head of operations in the Southwest, said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times in 2020. Charles Schwab Charles Schwab left for Westlake, Texas, in 2019 after it agreed to buy Omaha-based TD Ameritrade. Schwab chairman and founder Charles Schwab singled out the business climate in California as motivation for the move: "The costs of doing business here are so much higher than some other place" he told Forbes. The companies said in a joint statement that their new home would "allow the combined firm to take advantage of the central location of the new Schwab campus." In 2023, SFGate reported that Schwab further reduced its presence in San Francisco, its former home. "We've had an extremely positive experience in Texas," a spokesperson from Schwab said in a statement to BI. "From day one, the energy, innovation, and welcoming spirit of North Texas has far exceeded our expectations." Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) In 2020, Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced it was leaving California, another COVID-19 era departure. "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. Palantir Software giant Palantir left Silicon Valley in 2020. Before the tech company moved, CEO Alex Karp said he had concerns about California. "I'm pretty happy outside the monoculture in New Hampshire," Karp told Axios in May 2020 when asked if he would move back to California as the COVID-19 pandemic was receding. Karp said at the time that Palantir was narrowing down its list of future homes, which potentially included Colorado. Palantir has been in Denver since August 2020. SpaceX Elon Musk promised to move SpaceX to Texas in 2024, part of a series of announcements that positioned his companies away from California. 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. "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." AECOM Global consultancy firm AECOM left Los Angeles in 2021, saying that Texas offered more benefits. "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," a company spokesperson told The LA Times. FICO Financial data analytics firm FICO, officially known as the Fair Isaac Corporation, quietly moved to Bozeman, Montana, sometime in 2021. The company, best known for its FICO score, previously moved its corporate headquarters from Minneapolis to San Jose in 2013.

Epoch Times
a day ago
- Epoch Times
Only 18 Percent of Californians Can Afford to Buy a Home
In California, the housing market appears stable, but the income needed to afford a typical home is well over $200,000 a year. Most households make less than half that. Only 18 percent of Californians can afford to purchase a median-priced home. In this episode, economist Oscar Wei explains how interest rates, limited supply, an...


Fox News
2 days ago
- Fox News
High-speed rail isn't California's only expensive boondoggle
Print Close By Michael Feuz Published July 25, 2025 California Gov. Gavin Newsom is suing the Trump administration for pulling back $4 billion in federal funding for high-speed rail. But President Donald Trump hasn't actually derailed any trains. And all the lawsuit has really done is expose the trainwreck that is California's fiscal situation. For months, Newsom has bragged about California having the world's fourth-largest economy and sending back more money to Washington than it takes in. He's right, but he's also conveniently ignoring that California also boasts the nation's highest real poverty rate and a projected budget deficit as high as $20 billion. That just scratches the surface of the fiscal mess Californians deal with every day – not just in Sacramento, but at every level of government. Let's start with the high-speed rail project. Voters approved it in 2008 to run from San Francisco to Los Angeles at an approximate cost of $40 billion with a completion date of 2033. As of June of this year, the projected cost was as high as $128 billion with no track laid. CALIFORNIA'S GREEN NEW SCAM COULD COST YOU $20,000 Los Angeles residents know this kind of bureaucratic ineptitude all too well. Complex and sometimes conflicting county and state environmental regulations played an important role in the closure of the county's second-largest landfill, Chiquita Canyon, at the end of 2024. Residents now have to fund the added expense of hauling trash to a landfill farther away while local politicians obsess over "price-gouging" by those who haul and handle residents' garbage. Taxpayers are burdened enough with the political junk Sacramento sends their way; local officials would be a lot more useful if they reduced, instead of added, to the heap. Los Angeles, meanwhile, can't seem to provide essential services at any price, gouged or otherwise. Check out all of the fire hydrants that didn't work during the recent fires and the empty city-run reservoir nearby. Anyone who oversaw those failures and still has a job is gouging taxpayers with every paycheck. Paying for incompetence is bad enough, but what about corruption? That's what taxpayers across the state have funded for years as officials in state, county and city governments have colluded in a Medicaid reimbursement scheme by allowing government-owned providers to charge as much as 13 times more for certain services than the private sector is allowed to charge. CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINION Not only has this practice squeezed private providers, thereby limiting care options for non-Medicaid patients, but it has allowed California to paper over its unfunded pension obligations for government employees by pocketing the difference. And those obligations will come due faster than policymakers prefer as the nation's highest cost-of-living and top marginal tax rates continue to drive taxpayers and businesses out of the state. "Businesses that want to grow and parents who want to provide for their families have been moving out of California for a decade, especially to states like Texas and Florida that have no or minimal income taxes," said Vance Ginn, Ph.D., chief economist for the Office of Management and Budget during the first Trump administration. "And that trend isn't likely to reverse itself because lawmakers and regulators up and down the state keep spending more and regulating and taxing themselves out of residents." CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP Cleaning up California's fiscal mess will take a lot more than creative accounting tricks, piecemealing federal funding grants and soaking the taxpayers – like the one-time windfall of capital gains taxes that created the temporary surplus in 2022. It requires reining in out-of-control spending while also reducing the regulatory burden on residents and businesses. That's why Newsom's lawsuit over the train funds isn't about infrastructure. It's about image. His flip on gender identity issues and sudden support for reducing California's atrocious housing regulations were sops to "the middle," but he also wants to make the Left happy by showing he can stand up to Trump. At federal taxpayer expense, of course, all the while claiming that he's keeping California "innovative" while basic governance collapses underneath. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM MICHAEL FEUZ Print Close URL