Some people have to live in Texas for a year or two before they figure out that Texas taxes are equal to or greater than California taxes for them. And they get less out of it, because people like Elon aren’t paying income taxes, and the businesses get so many tax breaks.

Turns out you can’t fund schools on hopes and prayers.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The enemy’s chief newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, worried that Silicon Valley’s “monopoly” was over and wondered if Austin was “the future.” Governor Greg Abbott declared Texas was “truly the land of business, jobs, and opportunity.”

That year the tech goliath Oracle relocated its HQ to Austin, where it had already built a massive campus on the south shore of Town Lake, and Elon Musk began building a gargantuan Cybertruck factory just outside the city.

Oracle, which makes business software, cited Nashville’s strength as a center of the American health-care industry, though it surely also helps that the company is getting nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in tax breaks and incentives from the city and the state of Tennessee.

But while hard financial realities explain the HQ move and the layoffs, the news also evidences a moment of cultural change: the sudden hotness Austin enjoyed in 2020 has dissipated, at least a bit, into notness.

In the mad summer of 2020, tech evangelist Joe Lonsdale wrote that Texas stood as a new frontier in the fight for human freedom and vowed to build a new city outside Austin to serve as a safe haven for disruptors, like other utopians who have been coming to the state for centuries.

Governor Rick Perry was the main figure associated with this contest: he bragged endlessly about the deals he had struck with CEOs from colder and more heavily income-taxed states, and even about the rising price of in-demand U-Haul rentals from San Francisco to Dallas.

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