Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity

thinkindie

https://archive.is/2g0QI

J_Shelby_J

Texas is where companies go to die.

almost_usual

Life is short. If folks want to spend their time in Texas more power to them.

dyauspitr

This is only going to help with turning that state blue.

peyton

> State officials are eager to supplant Delaware as America’s corporate-law hub. In 2024 they established the Texas Business Court, presided over by expert judges capable of handling even the most complex disputes. Last year the state also introduced a measure to allow firms to prevent shareholders with a stake of less than 3% from suing them, and another to let only large shareholders put forward proxy proposals. Interesting, hadn’t heard. I can’t wait to see where this goes. Working with regulators is a terrible experience. I hope they can fix this as well.

alephnerd

Additionally, Apollo (the world's second largest PE firm after Blackstone) has just selected Austin as it's second HQ [0] as it is looking to shift the bulk of it's hiring and headcount outside of NYC [1]. This is a huge deal, just like how Wachovia-Wells Fargo merger helped build NC's PE industry and Citadel's new HQ in Miami helps put Florida on the map for high finance. [0] - https://www.ft.com/content/036a838f-8209-4df7-8cbc-bb069e4e7... [1] - https://www.ft.com/content/efeca6be-c9b5-4912-b66b-15716cc91...

water-data-dude

As a gay dude I will never take a job in Texas. Companies may enjoy the lax regulatory environment and favorable tax laws, but there are many bright people who - for one of a NUMBER of reasons - will never move there. It is repressive and frightening. Who knows if that will be enough to move the needle on any of this, but companies aren't just buildings and incorporation paperwork, they're also the people.

darth_avocado

Sounds like a whole lot of “companies can do whatever they want to without anyone else having a say in it”. Sounds amazing in the short term but a nightmare in the long term if you live there.

m-hodges

Anticipating all the Texas hate comments, just gonna plant a flag and say I love living in Austin. This city rules.

ChrisArchitect

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418721

nostrademons

Something I've wondered: for all its claims of business-friendliness, why does Texas insist on attracting the lowest-margin industries? All of the high-margin innovation-based industries continue to get started in California. There was a huge Bitcoin push in Texas about 5ish years back. But the way they went about it was that they passed a bunch of tax breaks for Bitcoin miners - the most commodified, energy-intensive part of the value chain. Coinbase and Kraken and Ripple and Solana and Binance's U.S. operations are all based out of California. The article mentions Exxon's reincorporation in Texas, and Chevron also recently moved their headquarters from California to Houston. But oil is a dying, commodified industry. The replacement is electrification, in terms of solar, batteries, EVs, inverters, and other parts of the value chain. Enphase is in California, SunPower was until its recent bankruptcy, Tesla R&D is still in Palo Alto, and other major companies like Rivian and Lucid also put all their R&D in the Bay Area. The other major industry Texas is known for is construction, and cheap houses. But construction, if you read any of the construction-physics.com articles that frequently pop up here, is another famously low-margin industry. We know how to do it, and millions of people do. My theory is that low-margin industries get located in Texas because they make it easy . By being business-friendly, low-regulation, and low-expenses, they become the only place that low-margin commodity businesses can survive. Thus, everyone who has no pricing power and struggles to cut costs moves to Texas, because they offer the lowest costs of everyone. California is the opposite: by making business onerous, creating huge amounts of regulation, taxing the hell out of both people and businesses, and enshrining a pyramid scheme in their state constitution via Prop 13, they make sure that only the richest can survive there . And thus only the richest do survive. The state is filled with wealthy companies and wealthy individuals because everybody else got priced out and moved elsewhere. Selection effects dominate efficiency effects.

schmookeeg

I find it amusing that these two stories hit the front page one right after the other. > Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity > What Happens to an Economy When It's Too Hot to Work?

queenkjuul

I love how on an article about Texas, half the comments are about California. As a Midwesterner, i always forget that those are the only two places

OutOfHere

Texans, I hope you like PFAS in your water and soil because Texas being unregulated would have loads of it.

arppacket

Given the state's war on education, how do companies think they'll have a pipeline of well educated workers? We know it's only going to become more biblical as long as the current Supreme Court exists.