Another one of Bay Area’s best-known brands, Oracle, is pulling up stakes and heading east to Texas, just days after Elon Musk revealed during an interview that his company Tesla has moved to Texas. Also, Oracle’s move comes less than two weeks after HP Enterprise, also announced that it is separately moving to Texas.
The news that Oracle was moving to Texas was first reported by Bloomberg and was later confirmed by the company in a statement sent to TechCrunch, saying that along with a “more flexible employee work location policy,” the American multinational computer technology corporation has changed its corporate headquarters from Redwood Shores, California, to Austin. “We believe these moves the best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work.”
According to TechCrunch, a spokeswoman did not answer more questions related to the move. Still, the company says that “many” of its employees can make their choice for office location and also continue to work from home, part-time or full time.
HPE and Oracle aren’t the first major tech companies to plot such moves in recent times as tech giants Apple and Google have also been making their presence felt in the state. In 2018, Apple announced that it was building a $1 billion campus in Austin. Meanwhile, since last year, Google has admitted that it was beginning to lease far more space in the city.
Some of the reasons behind the big companies moving include taxes, a lower cost of doing business, a more affordable cost of living for employees, and less competition for talent. However, there is also an understanding that culture is a factor, as well. Political clout can also be included as one reason; as the divide between the Democrats and the Republicans grows, so does the divide between their respective supporters.
Larry Ellison, Oracle co-founder, and Chairman has been openly supporting President Donald Trump and is notably one of the few top tech execs. Meanwhile, co-founder of the venture firm 8VC and Palantir Technologies, Joe Lonsdale, explained his own move this year to Texas from California in the Wall Street Journal, writing: “Politics in the state is in many ways closed off to different ideas. We grew weary of California’s intolerant far left, which would rather demonize opponents than discuss honest differences of opinion.”
Recently, Elon Musk suggested he was also outside of Democratic circles in conversation with reporter Kara Swisher, describing his political views as “socially very liberal and then economically right of center, maybe, or center? I don’t know. Obviously, I’m not a communist.”
While many of California’s wealthiest contrarians are making their move to Austin, others are headed to Florida, another Republican-controlled state that, like Texas, does not collect state tax.
Keith Rabois, a general partner at Founders Fund, recently left the Bay Area for Miami. He contributed to The Never Trump Movement in 2016 and said his first choice for U.S. president that year was Democratic contender Pete Buttigieg. But he has also worried openly about democratic socialism that the Republican party has accused the Democrats of promoting.
Venture capitalist David Blumberg, another of the openly Trump supporters, is also headed to Miami, he announced recently. Blumberg said that he had it with “poor governance at the local level in San Francisco and statewide in California.”
According to a report by Vox, Blumberg believes that tech platforms are biased against conservatives. He also admitted to the outlet that the Valley consisted of many more Trump supporters than might be imagined, and that “we generally keep our heads down” because “people who go out publicly for Republicans and Trump can get business banned or get blackballed.”
On the contrary, one tech exec, Twitter, and Medium co-founder Ev Williams have returned to the Bay Area from New York. Williams, who spent 20 years in the Bay Area, was largely “looking for a change,” and made the move with his family late last year, he recently told TechCrunch. Then Coronavirus struck.
“I had never lived in New York and thought, ‘Why not go? Now seems like a good time.’ Turns out I was wrong. [Laughs.] It was a very bad time to move to New York.”
