Back in the halcyon days of 2020, a year we all remember fondly, a new flash point opened in the enduring war between Texas and California. Technologists started picking up sticks in Taxifornia and moving to the Lone Star State in greater numbers. The enemy’s chief newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, worried that Silicon Valley’s “monopoly” was over and wondered if Austin was “the future.” Governor Greg Abbott declared Texas was “truly the land of business, jobs, and opportunity.”

In the wave of stories about Austin’s ascension in 2020, there were always two pieces of evidence given top billing. That year the tech goliath Oracle relocated its HQ to Austin, where it had already built a massive campus on the south shore of Town Lake, and Elon Musk began building a gargantuan Cybertruck factory just outside the city. Austin-area authorities helped Oracle secure valuable lakefront real estate and offered Tesla some $60 million in tax abatements, including $50 million from the historically struggling school district in Del Valle. The new facilities were greeted by state officials as evidence that the “Texas Miracle” was alive and well. Abbott proudly proclaimed last year that Austin was “THE destination for the world’s leading tech companies.”

This week saw a major plot twist in that narrative: Oracle declared it was moving its headquarters to Nashville, and Tesla—the largest private employer in the capital city—announced it would be laying off almost 2,700 workers from its Austin plant after a disappointing earnings report. Texas wasn’t really at fault here. Oracle, which makes business software, cited Nashville’s strength as a center of the American health-care industry, though it surely also helps that the company is getting nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in tax breaks and incentives from the city and the state of Tennessee. Tesla, meanwhile, laid off workers across the country after the Cybertruck suffered significant quality issues that put the future of its Austin production facility in doubt. The city’s debut in auto manufacturing is a vehicle that apparently rusts in the rain. The factory complex, which Musk once promised would become an “ecological paradise,” recently took advantage of a new state law to exempt itself from Austin’s environmental regulations.

Texas Monthly