Everyone Left California for Texas. Now They're Leaving Texas.

Añadido: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Starbucks, Oracle, In-N-Out. Three iconic American brands, three completely [music] different industries. But one thing they all suddenly have in common, they're planting flags here in Tennessee. Tennessee. Tennessee. Wait, why Tennessee? Tennessee? I mean, New York, California, Florida, Texas. I get, but Tennessee. Starbucks is building a $100 million office in Nashville with 2,000 employees. Their global headquarters stays in Seattle, but Nashville becomes the base for their entire push into the south and east.

[00:00:30]Closer to suppliers, closer to customers, closer to where their growth actually is happening. Then there's Oracle, one of the most powerful tech companies on Earth. First, they left California for Texas. Then a few years later, they packed up again and headed to Nashville. And then In-N-Out Burger spent decades refusing to even expand past Texas. They guarded their brand like a big secret, but now they're building a $125 million headquarters outside Nashville, and they're eyeing 35 locations across the state. But what is happening out there? What does Tennessee know that the rest of the country is just figuring out? Let's get into it.

[00:01:05]>> Past 15 years, the population has exploded.

[00:01:08]>> It's booming.

[00:01:09]>> A new study shows Knoxville is likely to be the number one spot people are going to move to in the nation next year.

[00:01:15]>> It was safe and affordable. That was really what we were looking for. But wait, is this actually a boom or is it just a couple companies? Fair question, because three big names on its own doesn't necessarily quantify a big trend. But let's look at what the numbers are saying. Over 73,000 new businesses filed in Tennessee in 2024.

[00:01:34]73,000. And business renewals grew 31.8% in a single year. Most of them are small and mid-size companies quietly making the same decision the big guys are making. The state added 45,400 jobs in 2024 and unemployment was about 3.6% while the national rate was about 4.1%.

[00:01:53]Tennessee's GDP hit $449 billion in 2025. That's the highest the state has ever recorded. And while the US economy is expected to grow around 2% in 2025, Tennessee is expected to grow at 2.5%.

[00:02:07]People are moving there, too. [music] Nashville has been growing every single year for a decade. The metro area hit 1.35 million people in 2025. Rutherford, Wilson, Williamson, and Sar counties, all ranked in the state's top 10 for population growth in the last year.

[00:02:22]Families are spreading out, too. They're buying up homes, setting up lives. This is a real boom. The tax situation is hard to ignore. California taxes income at 13.3%. Tennessee taxes it at 0%.

[00:02:35]Imagine a company with about 2,000 employees averaging $100,000 in salary.

[00:02:40]You could be talking about roughly $26 [music] million a year in savings before you've changed anything about how you operate just because you're in Tennessee versus California. On top of that, Tennessee's corporate tax rate is [music] 6.5% and property taxes are amongst the lowest in the country. The state has the second lowest overall tax burden per capita in the entire nation. And here's what makes it even more interesting.

[00:03:02]>> [music] >> When five companies recently relocated to Williamson County, just outside Nashville, the county said it didn't offer any financial incentives to get them there. Nobody had to be convinced.

[00:03:11]They just came. Let's pull up a map of Tennessee and really look at it.

[00:03:15]Tennessee borders eight other states. No other state in the country borders more.

[00:03:20]Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky. It sits right in the middle of the eastern half of the country. About 60% of the entire US population lives within an 11-hour drive of Tennessee. 12 million people are within a 2 and 1/2 hour drive. That's partially why FedEx put its global headquarters in Memphis. Memphis International Airport is one of the busiest cargo airports on the planet.

[00:03:44]Tennessee also has the third largest rail center and the fifth largest inland port [music] in the country. When Starbucks announced their Nashville office, they were very specific about why. They said Nashville was the ideal location to get closer to suppliers and build a stronger presence across the southeast and broader North America.

[00:04:04]Logistics drove that decision as much as anything else. The people are there. You can have great tax rates and a great location, but if there's no talent pool, none of it matters. Tennessee has been building one quietly for years.

[00:04:17]Williamson County is just south of Nashville and it's one of the most highly educated counties in America with more than 60% of adults holding a bachelor's degree or higher. And the pipeline keeps growing. Your phone is broadcasting a unique ID. It's called IMSI and it's doing this every single day. Advertisers, data brokers, hackers, they're using it to track everywhere you go. So, a lot of people [music] use VPNs and private browsers, but completely forget that the cellular network itself is actually the biggest leak. Enter Cape. That's the sponsor of today's video. It's a mobile carrier that is actually fixing this. Same unlimited call, text, and data you expect, but built entirely around privacy. Their identifier rotation feature changes your IMSI every 24 hours. So, to the network, you're a completely different person every single day. They also give you two secondary phone numbers in the plan.

[00:05:07]Keep your real number for people you trust. Use the secondaries for apps and strangers. And while most apps hold on to your data, Cape deletes your call and text data after just one day. Use code upton 33 to get 33% off your first 6 months. You can find Cape on the App Store or in Google Play. And now back to the video. The Nashville region is home to more than 120,000 college students across over 20 universities. This creates a fresh wave of graduates every year, and increasingly those graduates are choosing to actually stay. Since before the pandemic, Tennessee has added more than 184,000 employed workers to its economy. They're building cars here, too. Ford is building something called Blue Oval City in West Tennessee. It's a nearly 6 square mile campus dedicated to building next generation electric F-S series trucks and the batteries to power them. Ford and its South Korean battery partner are putting in 5.6 6 billion combined to create around 6,000 jobs.

[00:06:03]One of the biggest manufacturing [music] investments in the history of this country in a part of the state most people just drive through on the highway. Alliance Bernstein manages over $700 billion in assets. They moved their entire headquarters out of New York City to downtown Nashville, filling eight floors of office space and bringing over 1,000 employees with them. Amazon is there. Ernston Young is there. The In-N-Out story is personal. In-N-Out isn't just a fast food chain. It's a California institution. And for decades, the whole appeal was that you couldn't get it anywhere else. It was a West Coast thing. But when the owner says that she's personally leaving California, that lands differently than just another corporate press release.

[00:06:44]Lindsay Snyder is a 43year-old who grew up in North Carolina. She runs one of the most beloved food brands in America.

[00:06:50]And she went on a podcast to say it [music] plainly.

[00:06:53]>> Raising a family is not easy here. Doing business is not easy here.

[00:06:58]>> Remember, she's not just sending employees to Tennessee. She's moving there herself. The Irvine office that the company has had for decades is closing. Some of her California corporate team is relocating with her.

[00:07:10]This is a company that spent years refusing to even expand past [music] Texas just to protect the brand. The exclusivity was the point. But now they're not just expanding east with locations, they're moving leadership east, too. That's a founder who looked at the state her company was in [music] and decided it's time to go. But wait a minute, what happened to Texas? Because a couple years ago, I made a video about Texas. It was booming. It was taking companies from California. It was all about Texas. Texas deserves credit. It genuinely led this whole movement because between 2018 and 2024, the Dallas Fort Worth area alone attracted 100 corporate headquarters relocations, more than any other metro in the country. When companies started leaving California, Texas caught most of them.

[00:07:52]But things shifted. Austin lost its title as the fastest growing large city in America after holding it for 12 years and office vacancy rates there are now among the highest of any major city. All those people and companies that flooded in drove up housing prices, clogged the roads, and made Austin start to feel like a smaller, hotter version of the place where everyone was leaving.

[00:08:14]Companies relocating to Austin went from 64 in 2022 to 37 in 2023 to just about 11 by 2024. There's also a structural issue here, too. Texas does more trade than any other state in America. Over $850 billion a year, and a significant portion runs through Mexico. When trade policy gets volatile, Texas feels it first. Texas business owners said that tariff uncertainty was one of their biggest concerns heading into 2025 with competence dropping to levels not seen since the pandemic. Tennessee's economy is more domestic, [music] more diversified, and less exposed to that kind of pressure. Oracle lived in Texas, looked around, but then moved to Nashville. So, is Tennessee the new Texas? Well, that's probably the wrong question. Texas was the first place companies ran to when they got fed up with California and New York. Tennessee is what that idea looks like when it actually matures. Better geography, more livable cities, a talent base that has been accumulating for years. A state that manages its finances tightly enough that it doesn't need to really bribe anyone to show up. Lindsay Snyder is not moving to Tennessee because of a tax credit. [music] She's moving because California, the state she was born in and built her company in, stopped feeling like the right place to raise a family and run a business. That sentiment is spreading far beyond a burger chain. Tennessee has actually been putting in the pieces [music] for years now and everyone is now just starting to notice. Let me know in the comments what do you think. Should California and New York be worried?

[00:09:44]Heck, should Texas and Florida be worried? And I want to know where you see this trend going. Let me know in the comments below. While you're at it, to help support this channel, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss the next video.