The Wealthy Leaving California: just a handful or a trend?

Back in August I wrote about Joe Rogan moving from California to Texas. I mentioned that the top 0.4% of households (estimated at 50,000) in the state paid 40% of the state's income taxes. In the article, I quoted the following:

Of course, CalMatters (Aug 13) reports the general assumption by liberals: 

But history suggests raising income taxes doesn’t drive large numbers of wealthy people away. The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality looked at past tax increases, including the 2004 millionaires tax, when voters approved a 1% tax increase on income above $1 million, and Proposition 60 in 2012, which raised the tax rate on the top income bracket from 10.3 percent to its current rate of 13.3, the highest in the nation. Those increases, researchers said in a 2018 paper, led at most 0.04% of the state’s top earners to leave.

I wondered at the time how high taxes could possibly go before the wealthy started to leave the state. Now, I don't know if this is a trend, but additional stories are started to pop up of wealthy people leaving the state.

San Francisco Gate (Nov 22) writes about Keith Rabois of Paypal, Square, LinkedIn fame:

Rabois, an early executive at PayPal, Square, LinkedIn and more, told Fortune he is "moving imminently" because he's finding it "impossible to stay" in San Francisco. After living in the Bay Area for 20 years, he said he plans on moving to Florida.

"I think San Francisco is just so massively improperly run and managed that it's impossible to stay here," Rabois told Fortune. He told the publication other friends in his peer group have done the same, and a look at his Twitter account shows multiple tweets about the so-called San Francisco exodus.

Of course, he doesn't mention anything about taxes.

CNBC (Dec 4) reports on Elon Musk of Tesla: 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk put his California houses on the market this year while he was sparring with state lawmakers over Covid-19 restrictions. He’s simultaneously been expanding operations in Texas and cozying up to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

Now, several of his close friends and associates say that Musk has told them he’s planning to move to the Lone Star State. The people with knowledge of his plans asked not to be named because their conversations were private.

I wonder what his girlfriend Grimes thinks of this attempt to avoid taxes? The article doesn't make an attempt to estimate how much in taxes he is avoiding (more just mentions the tax rates and his wealth without putting an estimate on tax savings), but I would think it would be in the 9 figure range when he exercises his options.

Business Insider (Nov 23) reports on Drew Houston of Dropbox: 

Drew Houston is planning to move to Austin full-time, the latest high-profile departure from Silicon Valley. Houston, who's the founder and CEO of cloud storage company Dropbox, purchased a house in Austin that will eventually become his full-time residence, according to The Information's Cory Weinberg, Kate Clark, and Zoë Bernard. A spokesperson for Dropbox did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment on Houston's plans.

Here's my thinking: California might have had a monopoly on tech entrepreneurs for years. If you wanted to run a start-up, you needed to go where employees and other entrepreneurs were. But as more and more tech executives and employees start moving to Texas, do the flood gates start to open up?

Here's the problem for Texas: will this turn the state blue and will it start to slowly turn into California in terms of taxes and regulations?