Elon Musk, the inventor, investor, and capitalist, has called it quits on California, his home for the past 25 years. He’s gone to Texas.

As reported by FoxBusiness.com on Tuesday, "For myself, yes, I have moved to Texas," Musk told Wall Street Journal editor in chief Matt Murray at a CEO Council Summit. "We've got the Starship development here in South Texas where I am right now. We're hopefully going to do a launch later today. And then we've got big factory developments just outside of Austin for Giga Texas as well."

With Tesla’s soaring stock price, Musk has become America’s (and the world's), second-richest person.

The move to Texas means that he will increase his chances at avoiding a 13.3 percent state income tax on the capital gains he takes in the event he sells Tesla stock or receives bonuses—though California’s Franchise Tax Board can be known for their relentless pursuit of income taxes across state lines. Texas has no personal income tax.

He’s not alone. What started as a trickle may become a flood.

Musk’s personal change of address follows quickly on the heels of Hewlett Packard Enterprise moving from Silicon Valley to Houston, Joe Lonsdale, like Musk, a Silicon Valley founder (Palantir and Addepar) and venture capitalist moving to Austin, and innovative millionaire podcaster Joe Rogan moving from Los Angeles to Austin

And, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, it isn’t just the rich and famous who are leaving California. Every year for the past 15 years, about 100,000 more Californians leave the state than other Americans move in, with the most popular destination consistently Texas, 1,300 miles to the east.

Commenting on California’s business climate, Musk likened the Golden State to a sports team that starts winning for so long that its players take things for granted and get complacent and entitled and “…then they don’t win the championship anymore.”

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO noted he still has a large corporate presence in California and observed, “Tesla is the last car company still manufacturing cars in California. SpaceX is the last aerospace company still doing significant manufacturing in California.”

He then drove the point home at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council summit on Tuesday saying, “There used to be over a dozen car plants in California. And California used to be the center of aerospace manufacturing. My companies are the last two left.”

I can personally attest to Musk’s claim. I worked in California’s aerospace industry for 13 years prior to being elected to the State Assembly in 2004. By the time I termed-out in 2010, the headquarters at which I consulted had vacated the state. The next year, I moved to Texas.

Tesla looked to Texas to begin building a new Gigafactory this summer, breaking ground outside of Austin in a matter of weeks. A similar effort in California would have consumed five years with millions of dollars tied up in environmental lawsuits likely brought by labor unions—a common practice known in California as “greenmail.”

Musk criticized California’s heavy regulatory climate, employing the analogy, “You have a forest of redwoods and the little trees can’t grow.” He suggested this results in government-enforced monopolies and duopolies because startups get strangled by high regulatory compliance costs.

California should “just get out of the way” of innovators, Musk said.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott frequently tells businesses about the benefits of moving to Texas. Business relocation experts say firms can save about 32 percent of their operating costs by moving out of California to Texas, largely due to tax and regulatory savings, but also lower energy costs, land costs, and housing costs for employees.

Last May, Musk threatened to move Tesla out of California in a dust-up over conflicting COVID-19 restrictions that shut down Tesla’s factory in Fremont in the San Francisco Bay area. Musk called the health orders “fascist” and said the stay-at-home orders were “forcibly imprisoning people in their homes.”

Soon after, Democrat San Diego California State Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez tweeted “F*ck Elon Musk.”

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