11 of the Biggest Companies to Leave California

Pharmaceutical giant McKesson left California in 2019. In terms of public companies, only Apple loomed larger in the Bay Area.

Then-CEO John H. Hammergren said that McKesson was moving its headquarters to Las Colinas, Texas (near Dallas) to “improve efficiency, collaboration and cost-competitiveness, while providing an exceptional work environment for our employees.”

McKesson remains the highest-ranking Fortune 500 company to leave California in recent years.

Oil giant Chevron had deep roots in California, going back to the 1870s when an early predecessor discovered oil north of Los Angeles. That didn’t stop the company from moving to Houston in 2024.

Looking back on its move, the energy giant says that California’s leaders have taken steps that made it “unappealing.”

“While our relocation has very real benefits to our business, we also believe California policymakers have pursued policies that raise costs and consumer prices, creating a hardship for all Californians, especially those who can least afford it,” Ross Allen, a spokesperson for Chevron, said in a statement to Business Insider. “These policies have also made California investment unappealing compared with opportunities elsewhere in the US and globally.”

Like some of his fellow tech CEOs, Elon Musk grew frustrated with the limitations of the Bay area before Tesla left for Austin in 2021.

“There’s a limit to how big you can scale in the Bay Area,” Musk said at the time.

Before the move, Musk had also clashed with officials over keeping Tesla’s Fremont, California, factory open despite COVID-19 orders.

In 2020, Oracle left its longtime home in California. The computer technology giant isn’t done moving yet.

Last year, CEO Larry Ellison said the computer technology giant would move its headquarters from Austin, where it had been for less than half a decade, to Tennessee.

“Nashville is a fabulous place to live,” Ellison said, according to an Associated Press report. “It’s a great place to raise a family. It’s got a unique and vibrant culture …. It’s the center of the industry we’re most concerned about, which is the health care industry.”

Global real estate company CBRE monitors the number of companies leaving California. The firm itself left Los Angeles in 2020.

“Designating Dallas as CBRE’s global corporate headquarters formalizes how our company has been operating for the past eight years,” Lew Horne, head of operations in the Southwest, said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times in 2020.

Charles Schwab left for Westlake, Texas, in 2019 after it agreed to buy Omaha-based TD Ameritrade.

Schwab chairman and founder Charles Schwab singled out the business climate in California as motivation for the move: “The costs of doing business here are so much higher than some other place” he told Forbes.

The companies said in a joint statement that their new home would “allow the combined firm to take advantage of the central location of the new Schwab campus.”

In 2023, SFGate reported that Schwab further reduced its presence in San Francisco, its former home.

“We’ve had an extremely positive experience in Texas,” a spokesperson from Schwab said in a statement to BI. “From day one, the energy, innovation, and welcoming spirit of North Texas has far exceeded our expectations.”

In 2020, Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced it was leaving California, another COVID-19 era departure.

“Houston is also an attractive market for us to recruit and retain talent, and a great place to do business,” CEO Antonio Neri said in a statement announcing the move.

Neri praised HPE’s new home in Spring, Texas (a Houston suburb), but stressed that the company was not leaving Silicon Valley entirely.

“Our San Jose campus will remain a hub for technological talent and innovation,” he said.

Software giant Palantir left Silicon Valley in 2020. Before the tech company moved, CEO Alex Karp said he had concerns about California.

“I’m pretty happy outside the monoculture in New Hampshire,” Karp told Axios in May 2020 when asked if he would move back to California as the COVID-19 pandemic was receding.

Karp said at the time that Palantir was narrowing down its list of future homes, which potentially included Colorado.

Palantir has been in Denver since August 2020.

Elon Musk promised to move SpaceX to Texas in 2024, part of a series of announcements that positioned his companies away from California.

In announcing SpaceX’s relocation, Musk singled out a California law that forbids schools from requiring staff to inform parents of a student’s gender identity.

“This is the final straw,” Musk wrote on X in July 2024. “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.”

Global consultancy firm AECOM left Los Angeles in 2021, saying that Texas offered more benefits.

“Dallas has emerged as a US hub for corporate headquarters and a compelling corporate talent magnet, particularly among our peers and public companies in the engineering and consulting sectors,” a company spokesperson told The LA Times.

Financial data analytics firm FICO, officially known as the Fair Isaac Corporation, quietly moved to Bozeman, Montana, sometime in 2021.

The company, best known for its FICO score, previously moved its corporate headquarters from Minneapolis to San Jose in 2013.

It’s not entirely clear why FICO left California.