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Comment by ip26 | Hacker News Reader

The interesting part is the next question you have to ask yourself- could Elon have built what he did somewhere else?

But that has a related cause and effect. The reason these things have happened in California isn't the geography. If you drive a large fraction of the same people out and into places like Austin through excessive housing costs and high taxes, then the next Elon Musk can build it there instead. Because it's the people, not the place.

Don’t be surprised if Texas (in particular Austin) adopts similar tax measures. I bet there is just as much public support for it—if not even more—then in California.

If Austin adopted it, people would just move two miles outside the city limits. And the state of Texas as a whole is not going to do that.

> The state of Texas as a whole is not going to do that.

What makes you so sure of that? Texas has a huge middle and working class. If asked I bet majority of Texans wouldn’t mind taxing their upper class. I think it is only a matter of time before politician is able to win over this vote share by targeting the state’s richest for taxation.

It doesn't matter the changing makeup of the state when the republicans have gerrymandered it to be unwinnable. Sure, it might go blue a few presidential elections, but for policies that actually come from the statehouse it will be blood red for the foreseeable future.

Do you know many conservatives/Republicans?

I guess socialists crave what conservatives fear. My prediction is that as Texas becomes more democratic (lower case and capital D), the conservative’s fear will be increasingly realized.

Yeah could be. I just disputed your other comment that lots of middle class people wouldn't mind taxing the rich. Whereas most of the conservatives I know are ardently against tax increases by principle even if the tax wouldn't affect them. But sure if Tx changes politically then ya.

I guess your right, I’m sort of ignoring the existence of the conservative middle class (which I believe is kind of big in Texas). However I wouldn’t be surprised if we were to witness the political left winning over this vote share in less then a generation by targeting the wealthy elite. And I think this is even more likely to happen in Texas then say California.

But if you drive a large fraction of those people out, they don't all go to Austin. Austin therefore winds up with a lower concentration of those people than Silicon Valley had. By doing this, you can kill SV without creating a new one.

That depends on how much concentration you actually need.

You could kill SV and create five more.

It's easier to destroy the Valley than to create a timeline where a new Valley evolves. It really isn't an inevitability that anything like SV exist, and in fact, there are tons of reasons why it's unlikely a new one would evolve, chief among them the hostility to individual entrepreneurs* like regulatory capture, enforceable non-competes, and so on, as well a lot of the margin and efficiencies have been driven out of the business in favor of defensible moats and network effects.

The most likely thing isn't five more valleys, it's that the valley gets { Texas, Boston, Utah, Minnesota, DC Metro, ..}-ized and there is nothing like it again.

* (I _hate_ "entrepreneur"; I've founded and exited a company but as a term it is not in-line at all with the freewheeling, let's-do-this, let's-do-it-better-than-anyone way people who drove the valley in the 70s and 80s thought of themselves. The rise of "entrepreneur" as the way of thinking about founders correlates well, imho, with the decline of the valley as the center of technology.)

There should be efforts to to build new Silicon Valley’s. Putting all of tech’s eggs on one metro located near massive faultlines is just poor planning. There ought to be multiple redundancies.

How do you "drive" people out someplace they have no desire to live? I feel like the Kansas experiment[1] is a good example of the limits of tax policy as it relates to growth in employment and innovation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment#Jobs_and_gro...

You can see why that's obviously a chicken-and-egg circumstance though.

Texas Instruments was probably not founded in California, so the center of mass could easily shift again.

You only need a state with an Austin adopt a ban on noncompetes, or a state that currently bans noncompetes that miraculously develops an Austin. Once either happens then it’s game over for CA.

The end of Silicon Valley’s dominance could have come much sooner had China continued its trend of opening up pre-Winnie the Poo’s reign, but that threat is gone for now. China is crippled under a dictator again

Strongly agreed on all points. If WA, TX or NC ban noncompetes its basically over for CA. All of these areas have some great universities, major airports and a solid tech base already.

VCs prefer investing in companies in NYC and the Valley. So Paypal would have probably had to be built in one of those two markets. Once he had a successful company, I suspect he could have gone elsewhere and still received investment and convinced enough talented people to come join his projects. So I think for Elon in particular the answer is yes, but there might have only been a single other place he could have started in the USA, and we're specifically talking about Elon.

Honestly, I fantasize about a California with population levels pre-Gold-Rush, pre-Dust-Bowl and pre-Silicon-Valley.

Why not just move to a place like Idaho or Wyoming instead? You can have it right now instead of dreaming about it.

_You_ go to Idaho and Wyoming.

California is our state.

I’m sorry, but you have me confused with someone else who is fantasizing about “a California with population levels pre-Gold-Rush, pre-Dust-Bowl and pre-Silicon-Valley”.

I wasn’t being sarcastic with my previous comment

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