While it's catchy and hip to say that nobody wants to work for these companies, the reality is hundreds of thousands do. Both your example companies may not be popular with the cool kids and have their own controversies, but they offer great pay, benefits and consist of a lot of smart people.

Is the same true of Tesla? I know of plenty of people who work or would like to work for Tesla. Another group of companies that haven't received as much attention in the recent "SF exodus" narrative are Google and FB. Google has been opening large offices outside of SF for years and is slowly contributing to the growing of tech hubs around the country. Google's Boulder office comes to mind as a good example.

I'm not aware of any large FB spokes, but FB remote work allowance might end up having a similar effect. Not to mention the many startups that have realized that the distributed model works fairly well if you know how to do it, and opens up a large talent pool. I currently work for such a startup and we don't plan on going to back to a central SF office model post pandemic.

HPE and Oracle didn't leave the state, they moved their headquarters. The Oracle campus in Redwood City and the HPE campus in San Jose will remain, and they continue to hire locally. Also of note, both companies are incorporated in Delaware and that will continue to be the case.

The labor market has been catastrophically expensive for over a decade. They dealt with it. If anything, the flood of new wait-me-too CS grads and bootcamp graduates over the past couple years is great for legacy employers willing to slup up anyone who can write a line of code.

The tax market is the new problem. Now they are leaving.

200,000+ people work at those companies. I'm guessing not all of them are being held hostage there.