And the big thing they're doing in Texas, the giant factory beginning to ramp in Austin, has been known for years. It's not like they were going to build a second Bay Area gigafactory...
Hotspots like California rarely stay on the very top for more than 3-4 decades. After that, a certain rot starts to set in and new players find it easier to pitch up their tent elsewhere, where NIMBYism isn't as strong, landlords are less extortionate and governments more friendly.
Now it's simply too damn expensive to live in the Bay Area, too expensive therefore to hire.
That's the cost of success and why the 3 to 4 (5 to 7?) decade trend.
Austin will become too expensive and everyone will head to North Carolina (or wherever) in a few decades....
Where I live, the regions that have less investment and fewer people fight over investments (including railways and roads), while the richer ones like Prague often find reasons why to slow down or even stop such developments.
But yeah, this awaits Texas too and 2050 will have a new champion. Perhaps North Carolina, who knows.
It's not like Texas is that much better in any of these aspects. NIMBYism is a huge problem in the Austin area, which is seeing massive increases in rents and inability to keep up with housing demand due to entrenched real estate ownership.
The rent problem extends to the commercial side as well, which has seen so many local businesses fold due to rent pressure.
And yes, the government is much more business-friendly in Texas than it is California from a financial perspective, but major failures to govern during situations like the "Winterpocalypse" this year raise serious questions about Texas' long-term business viability. Case in point: according to Texas' own energy grid operator, the state was less than 5 minutes away from total failure during the winter storm, which would have results in statewide power outages lasting on the order of months. Not days, not weeks... months. Imagine for a minute what that would have done to one of the largest economies in the country[0] had it actually happened.
0: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/18/texas-power-outages-...
That's a moot point in a disaster scenario where the grid is down and traffic systems and utilities are disabled, etc. Tesla can't generate its own water, and that was one utility that was knocked out for much of Texas during the storm. There's a lot more that goes into keeping a manufacturing operation like that functional than just energy self-sufficiency.
Of course they could -- in theory they could drill a well and put in their own septic system. That's probably illegal in Austin proper but the Tesla facility is sufficiently far away that it might be legal there.
But people have been predicting this kind of Downfall of California for essentially all of those four (more like five now) decades! And they were wrong every time.
So, are you correct now because you are predicting Californian Doom from proper first principles? Or are you, like all your forebears, constructing those principles to argue for the conclusion you want to see? I think simple numbers (from your own post!) give you at best a 2-3% chance of being right.
California is fine. You'll know it's lost when somewhere else is better.
California's neuralgic point is Silicon Valley. IMHO if SV corporations start moving out in larger numbers, that will be the definite indication that somewhere else is better.
It is my impression that cost of living in and around SV is absolutely crazy, even for FAANG employees.
And they're not. Ergo...
I mean, its not like they will just drop all their current engineers. That would not be smart or wise. So they will keep them, but slowly transition to remove or TX employees as either new positions are created or old people leave and new openings arise.