Toen Tesla afgelopen najaar aankondigde dat het zijn hoofdkantoor van Californië naar Texas zou verhuizen, leken functionarissen in Sacramento meer verrast dan bezorgd.

Tesla was tenslotte zijn uitgestrekte assemblagefabriek in Fremont, Californië, aan het uitbreiden, waar al duizenden mensen werken. Het bouwt een batterijfabriek in de stad Lathrop in Noord-Californië.

En vastgoedmakelaars zeggen dat het bedrijf meer kantoorruimte huurt in Palo Alto, Californië, waar het hoofdkantoor sinds 2009 was gevestigd. Tesla werd in 2003 opgericht in het nabijgelegen San Carlos.

Maar Musks beslissing om het hoofdkantoor van de pionier op het gebied van elektrische voertuigen te verplaatsen naar Austin, de hoofdstad van de staat Texas, kan een teken zijn van toenemende wolken aan de horizon van de economische toekomst van Californië.

Voorlopig ziet het er nog rooskleurig uit voor de staat. Sacramento kent een ongekende omzetgroei, grotendeels dankzij de hoge vermogenswinstbelastingen die door de superrijken in Silicon Valley zijn betaald.

En in een maatstaf van de huidige greep van Californië op de technologiesector, blijft de Golden State verreweg de leider in het aantrekken van durfkapitaal.

Californië heeft jarenlang te maken gehad met een netto-uitmigratie van mensen naar Texas. Maar de bevolkingsverliezen waren meestal aan de onderkant van de sociaaleconomische schaal en de staat is gestaag rijker geworden ondanks de grote uitstroom van mensen.

Wat sommige economen en andere analisten zorgen baart, is dat dit gunstige patroon misschien begint te veranderen.

Tesla was een van een groeiend aantal Californische bedrijven, waaronder andere grote technologienamen zoals Oracle en HP Enterprise, die het hoofdkantoor naar Texas hebben verplaatst.

"Ik geloof dat dit slechts het topje van de ijsberg is", zegt Dan Ives, die al meer dan twee decennia de technologiesector behandelt en momenteel algemeen directeur is van het in Los Angeles gevestigde Wedbush Securities. Hij zei dat 20% van de bedrijven die hij volgt, overweegt te verhuizen of een tweede hoofdkantoor buiten Californië te openen.

Stanford's Hoover Institution telde 74 van dergelijke bedrijven die de staat verlieten in de eerste helft van vorig jaar, meer dan heel 2020 en hoger dan de vergelijkbare periode in elk van de voorgaande twee jaar. Onderzoekers noemden een hele reeks factoren voor de verandering:de stijgende kosten van levensonderhoud in Californië, een belastingstructuur en arbeidsbeleid die veel bedrijfsleiders als onvriendelijk beschouwen, en zorgen dat de kwaliteit van leven afneemt.

In het geval van Tesla, dat vorige maand ook begon met het produceren van voertuigen in de buurt van Austin, hebben de uitgesproken conservatieve opvattingen van zijn multimiljardairbaas Texas mogelijk tot een aantrekkelijke basis gemaakt. Musk is daar persoonlijk in 2020 naartoe verhuisd.

Het netto bevolkingsverlies van de staat naar Texas, de belangrijkste bestemming voor migranten, was vorig jaar ongeveer het dubbele van het tempo van het afgelopen decennium, volgens kredietgegevens die zijn geanalyseerd door Moody's Analytics. Sommigen behielden hun baan in Californië, dankzij nieuwe mogelijkheden om op afstand te werken. Others started new businesses in Texas.

To be sure, the Bay Area has such a deep reservoir of tech talent, money and infrastructure, not to mention the climate and the ocean, that it won't be easily knocked off its perch.

First-generation tech firms Apple, Cisco, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, among others, are still in the Bay Area, as are newer tech icons Facebook, Google and Netflix.

And Stanford and Berkeley are key generators of talent, research and new ideas for Silicon Valley's ecosystem.

But California's tech hub today seems to be facing what beset Hollywood years earlier, when Canada and states such as Georgia, where Marvel does much of its shooting nowadays, lured away film production from Los Angeles with numerous incentives.

"The Silicon Valley has lost its monopoly on opportunity, and now it has to compete," said Patrick McKenna, founder of One America Works, which connects talent with new tech communities. "It has to compete with other locations to attract the talent that's going to build the future."

McKenna spent 15 years in the Bay Area as an entrepreneur and investor, but in 2019 moved to Austin. He saw opportunities in central Texas, but also rued the fact that many people in the Bay Area were getting left behind in the tech boom.

Of the state's record budget surpluses, McKenna said, "California is flush right now because it's harvesting an investment that happened 10 years ago."

Increasingly he sees other states and nations cutting into California's share of the technology industry.

Economic officials at California Gov. Gavin Newsom's office say it's natural that as companies such as Tesla grow to become world leaders, they will expand elsewhere to be closer to markets and supply chains and to extend their global footprint.

Businesses will continue to leave California just as they have for decades, these officials argue, but there are good reasons why firms were born and incubated in the state, and why more will come and start new ventures and take companies public, creating more wealth and more jobs.

"The idea that the California economy is imperiled is not borne out by the numbers," said Dee Dee Myers, a former White House press secretary for President Clinton. She is now Newsom's director of business and economic development.

It's true that in tech, no city or state comes close to the Bay Area in the amount of new venture capital—$120 billion last year, a figure that until 2018 was more than the rest of the country combined, said Kyle Stanford, a senior analyst at PitchBook, a Seattle-based financial data and software firm that tracks private capital markets.

In terms of number of venture capital deals, despite growth elsewhere, the Bay Area's share held firm last year—topping 20% as it has every year since at least 2006. That's important because companies tend to start or set up fairly close to where the lead investor is based, which buys the Bay Area some time.

But, Stanford says, "There's definitely a risk of losing major emerging companies when you have these large tech giants move out. You're going to see engineers from Tesla probably create new companies in Austin, and those are companies that are going be lost in the Bay Area."

Moreover, while in the popular imagination Texas remains a vast landscape of cowboys, oil and conservative politics, the reality is more complex:The state's universities have built up stronger reputations in engineering and other specialties prized by corporations.

And Austin, whose unofficial motto is "Keep Austin weird," demonstrates at least some parts of the state are becoming culturally compatible with Californians.

Nor can Silicon Valley count on people coming from overseas to make up the loss.

Foreign-born students, researchers and entrepreneurs have been a big part of California's tech boom, but the unwelcoming immigration policies under former President Trump, plus lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and cold-war-like relations with China, have had chilling effects.

Then there's California's high cost of living, particularly housing.

In the Bay Area, the typical home now fetches a median price of $1.2 million, which is more than double the cost in Austin, despite the rapid rise in home values there. The cost of housing in Dallas is one-fourth the price in the Bay Area.

Brett Arnold, 35, an accountant and lifelong California resident, and his wife, Jamie, moved to a town about an hour north of Dallas last July, primarily because of the difference in the cost of living.

The couple had both worked in Orange County to keep up financially, but she wanted to stay at home with their 4-year-old. So last April the Arnolds sold their Rancho Santa Margarita townhome for $730,000 and bought a much larger 2,800-square-foot house in Prosper, Texas, for $570,000.

"The quality of life has gone up," Brett Arnold said.

For now at least, Austin's share of the nation's venture capital, tech startups and revenues pales next to the Bay Area. But it is rising, thanks in good part to Silicon Valley.

Meta, formerly Facebook, is leasing 33 floors in what will soon be the city's tallest building. Oracle is estimated to have 2,500 employees currently at its campus near Lady Bird Lake, and local reports say it's buying nine more acres nearby, enough to house well over 10,000 workers.

Amid the pandemic in 2020, as Oracle announced its headquarters move, the company said it would take "a modern approach to work that gives our employees more flexibility to choose where and how to work."

No one knows how many from Tesla have moved with Musk, although some, including Valerie Workman, head of human resources and one of its highest-ranking Black employees, have since left the company.

Musk, in his characteristically flamboyant style, said its Texas operations could scale up to 20,000 employees. Its Austin-area factory has the potential to produce three times as many vehicles as the Fremont facility, said Ives of Wedbush.

Over the next 18 to 24 months, Ives said, Tesla is likely to move the R&D and design operations now in Palo Alto to Austin.

"They could find engineers 50% cheaper in Austin than in the Silicon Valley," he said. And such a move would bring the company's brain trust close to where Musk himself lives.

Plus, that's what many employees may prefer, to settle in semi-remote places where they can enjoy a higher standard of living. It's partly why Tesla's Irvine-based rival, Rivian, is producing its vehicles in northern Illinois and outside Atlanta, analysts say.

Intel is building its new chip factory in Columbus, Ohio. Other tech firms are going to Nashville.

"California and the Valley always will have an allure geographically that can't be matched," Ives said, "but now you're starting to see alternatives."

Joel Kotkin, a fellow at Chapman University and longtime analyst of demographic, social and economic trends in California, worries especially about the state's heavy dependence for tax dollars from tech IPOs and the super-wealthy to pay for progressive but expensive policies—such as for the environment and the social safety net.

In 2019, the top 1% of taxpayers in California paid about 45% of personal income taxes, which make up about two-thirds of the state's entire general fund revenues.

In a report with colleague Marshall Toplansky, Kotkin wrote that the losses of company headquarters have eroded the state's economic diversity and opportunities for upward mobility for the middle class.

"In the aggregate we could look good because Apple computer by itself makes you look good," Kotkin said in an interview. "If we continue this gusher of tech money, we could just continue to subsidize the vast majority of the population and maybe won't collapse," he said.

But what happens if that cornucopia of tax money begins to shrink?

"We could either restore California's promise as a land where people go and their lives are improved," he said, "or we could become some sort of high-tech feudal state, which is where we're headed."