What comes to mind when you think of California? Sunshine? Beaches? Hollywood? The Bay Area and Silicon Valley?
Just about any one of those would be appropriate. But that last part especially speaks to the state’s status as an economic powerhouse. It’s home to some of the world’s largest companies, including Apple (AAPL) and Nvidia (NVDA), and as a result, California (if it were an independent nation) would in most years be considered the fourth- or fifth-largest economy in the world.
While true, California has also made a lot of headlines over the past few years for bleeding out large companies in favor of places like Texas and Tennessee. Today, I’m going to look at some of the most notable corporate emigrations from California and what has spurred those moves.
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These Companies Left the Golden State in the 2020s
Some companies have relocated their headquarters for financial reasons, others for operational needs, occasionally as a political statement, and a few have been left a mystery.
The following companies have relocated from California in recent years. I’ve included numerous statements from CEOs and co-founders to provide as good an idea as possible as to why they switched states.
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1. Tesla
American electric-vehicle company Tesla was previously headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is a popular site for technology companies—startups and global corporations alike.
But, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, “There’s a limit to how big you can scale in the Bay Area.”
Musk has also had conflicts with the state over COVID-19 restrictions. Specifically, Musk defied Alameda County orders and reopened his Fremont, California factory in May 2020; hundreds of workers at the plant would later test positive for the virus.
In 2021, Tesla packed up the headquarters and headed to Austin, Texas.
But this is where we’ll note that high-profile headlines over companies “leaving the state” don’t perfectly convey the situation. For instance, in Tesla’s case, the Fremont factory still employs 30,000 people, though there could be some disruption as the company plans to eliminate two of its models and produce Optimus robots on some of the plant’s lines instead. Also, in 2023, the company put its engineering and artificial intelligence (AI) engineering in Palo Alto, California.
2. SpaceX
Tesla isn’t the only company Elon Musk moved out of California. He also moved his spaceflight company, SpaceX, to Texas in late 2024.
In mid-2024, Musk wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “This is the final straw. 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.”
The law Musk referred to forbids schools from mandating staff to inform parents of students’ gender identities.
Musk is particularly fond of Texas. He incorporated Starbase in 2025. And he moved the aforementioned X to Balstrop, Texas, in September 2024. There were even reports in late 2023 that he planned to open a university in Austin, but after an initial funding, little more has come of it.
As you’ll soon see, Texas has become an attractive place for many other companies, too.
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3. Chevron
Integrated oil and gas major Chevron (CVX) was a California native since the 1870s, but in 2024, the company relocated to Houston, Texas.
Major oil and gas company Chevron had been a California native since the 1870s. However, in 2024, the company decided to relocate to Houston, Texas.
“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 hardship for all Californians, especially those who can least afford it,” Chevron spokesperson Ross Allen said in a statement to Business Insider.
What policies is Allen likely referring to?
California requires the production and sale of California Reformulated Gasoline, which has higher environmental standards than the federal blends used by the majority of other states. California’s blend reduces emissions, but the tradeoff is that it’s more costly to refine and results in higher gasoline prices.
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4. Neutrogena
Skin and hair care company Neutrogena had been headquartered in California since its founding in 1930. However, parent company Kenvue (KVUE) moved it in March 2025 as part of a broader corporate consolidation.
In this case, Neutrogena didn’t have any beef with California; it was just a logical move within the company’s plan to trim operations. Kenvue laid off 84 employees as part of the move, but all but 10 were offered relocation and employment at other Kenvue facilities.
Neutrogena was moved to Kenvue’s new headquarters in Summit, New Jersey—less than an hour away from the New Brunswick headquarters of Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), which spun off Kenvue into its own publicly traded company in August 2023.
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5. Realtor.com
One of the most recent companies to leave the Bay Area for the Lone Star State is Realtor.com. As the name suggests, the company connects home buyers with for-sale properties.
“Basing Realtor.com in Texas puts our company at the heart of innovation and inspiration at a moment of national economic renaissance for America,” Robert Thomson, CEO of Realtor.com parent News Corp. (NWSA) said in a statement about the early 2025 headquarters change. “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.”
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6. Fair Isaac Corporation
Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO), the financial data analytics firm that’s best known for its FICO credit-risk assessment system, has moved around a couple of times. It originally was located in Minneapolis, Minnesota before moving to San Jose, California, in 2013. However, it decided to return to the American North in 2021, when it headed off to Bozeman, Montana.
While remote, Bozeman has gained a reputation for being its own high-tech hub. “We want to hire the best, and the talent pool in this part of Montana has attracted dozens of leading technology firms,” CEO Will Lansing said in a 2016 announcement announcing a workforce expansion to the state.
The HQ might have moved, but the company still has three offices in California, as well as locations in Delaware, Florida, Minnesota, Texas, Virginia … and Sydney, Australia.
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7. Aecom
Global consultancy firm Aecom (ACM), previously headquartered in Los Angeles, left for Dallas in 2021.
“Dallas has emerged as a U.S. hub for corporate headquarters and a compelling corporate talent magnet, particularly among our peers and public companies in the engineering and consulting sectors,” a spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times.
Aecom maintains global offices in Los Angeles, however.
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8. Oracle
Oracle (ORCL), one of America’s 10 largest technology companies by market capitalization, left California in 2020 and resettled in Austin.
“Oracle is implementing a more flexible employee work location policy and has changed its Corporate Headquarters from Redwood City, California to Austin, Texas,” a spokesperson told CNBC at the time. “We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work.” But even after the move, it still had more employees in California than it did in Texas.
But Oracle’s HQ change didn’t stick. In 2024, Oracle founder and Chairman Larry Ellison announced that the company would be relocating to a new $1.2 billion campus in Nashville, Tennessee. “It’s the center of the industry we’re most concerned about, which is the health care industry,” he said. “Our people love it here, and we think it’s the center of our future.”
And yet, the company reportedly is having trouble attracting people to the Volunteer State, Fortune reported earlier this year:
“Yet, dangling rich incentives and a future amenity-laden office has only gotten the company so far. Only about 800 workers are assigned to offices in Nashville, Bloomberg reported, citing documents, compared to more than 5,000 in Kansas City, Mo., the base for health records company Cerner which it acquired in 2021. Another 5,000 employees are based in Redwood City and Austin, collectively. The company logged a net gain of just seven employees in Nashville for 2025, the Nashville Business Journal reported.”
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9. CBRE Group
Real estate firm CBRE Group (CBRE) actually monitors the number of companies moving out of California, and ironically, it added itself to the list in 2020.
“Designating Dallas as CBRE’s global corporate headquarters formalizes how our company has been operating for the past eight years,” Lew Horne, president of advisory services for CBRE’s Pacific Southwest region, said in a statement.
The company already had a substantial presence in Texas, so the change didn’t result in many jobs moving east. Indeed, CBRE retained thousands of employees in California.
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9. Hewlett Packard Enterprise
In 2020, enterprise technology company Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) relocated from California to—you guessed it—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 about the move at the time. (Note: HPE actually moved to Spring, Texas: a suburb of Houston.)
But the company maintained ties to California. “Our San Jose campus will remain a hub for technological talent and innovation,” Neri said.
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10. Palantir Technologies
AI data and analytics firm Palantir Technologies (PLTR) moved away from Silicon Valley in 2020.
“We seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sector’s values and commitments,” CEO Alex Karp said in the company’s prospectus ahead of its September 2020 initial public offering (IPO). Co-founder Joe Lonsdale had also criticized California’s income tax rate.
But Palantir’s honeymoon with its new home, Denver, didn’t last long. In February 2026, the company announced it would be relocating again, this time to Miami, Florida.
While Palantir was Colorado’s largest publicly traded company, Gov. Jared Polis said in a news conference that he believed that only about 600 Coloradans worked for the company either directly or indirectly.
While the company hasn’t yet specified its reason for moving, the company had been under fire by locals for supplying surveillance technology to the government, including the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
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Should California Be Worried?
Overall, the number of companies leaving isn’t necessarily alarming.
In 2025, California once again ranked the highest on Fortune 500’s list as the state with the highest number of corporations generating the largest revenues. It’s home to 58 Fortune 500 companies, still beating out Texas, which has 54. So for right now, California remains a highly popular place for companies.
Why, then, do you feel like every day you see a headline about companies fleeing California? It might be the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion. The gist of the phenomenon is that when you’ve newly noticed or learned about something, it then seems to appear everywhere. So while companies might not be leaving California in hordes, your brain is trained to notice the instances when it happens.
