Money and business do tend to migrate to where they’re treated the best. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:
And we coined “Management by Zooming Around.” Which is what Oracle’s Larry Ellison is doing.
When on December 11, Oracle disclosed that it “is implementing a more flexible employee work location policy and has changed its Corporate Headquarters from Redwood City, California to Austin, Texas,” it was another step in the process that we will henceforth call “Techsodus.”
The exodus of tech companies, executives, billionaires, millionaires, and regular tech employees from California, and particularly from San Francisco and Silicon Valley, is a combo of fleeing California and a shift to work-from-anywhere. Texas, Florida, Colorado, and other states have been among the destinations. Texas and Florida don’t levy state income taxes, so sure.
But Larry Ellison, co-founder and chairman of Oracle, isn’t moving to Texas along with the headquarters of his company. He has moved his primary residence to Hawaii, following Oracles new doctrine of working from anywhere. And Hawaii’s state income taxes are not far behind California’s.
Oracle already has a 560,000-square-foot campus in Austin, which it opened in 2018 – and moving its headquarters to Austin might not change all that much at first in terms of employment. Oracle said that it would “continue to support major hubs for Oracle around the world,” including its soon-to-be former headquarters in Redwood City. Oracle, founded in 1977, is one of the older tech companies that helped make Silicon Valley.
