Tesla in Austin is Imploding, Oracle Just Left, and Startups Literally Die in Austin – As a Panelist at SWSW Said, It’s a Place “Incompatible With Living a Heathy Life.” Meanwhile, the San Francisco tech scene keeps growing.
Tesla Semi, built in Texas, Being Towed by Diesel Truck
Not only did Big Tech not move into Austin as the conservative media hype had led us to believe, the little bit that is in Austin is crashing and people are leaving and the population is decreasing. Record vacancies for Austin business offices continues in 2025. The big news a few years ago was Oracle moving its HQ from the SF Bay Area to Austin after Texas gave Oracle many millions of dollars and free land, but of course, it was mostly hype and millions of taxpayer’s dollars given to a billionaire. California retained far more workers than the few who went to Texas – even Missouri had more Oracle workers than Texas.
Build it in dirty, filty Austin, and they will not come. Not only do they not come, they leave in droves. Living in the sweatiest city in the USA leaves much to be desired. Texas is so backward that kids going to school in Texas must now learn to embrace rape, violence, and slavery given the Bible is now part of the school curriculim in Texas. Austin is the most debt-ridden city in the USA, and people there are miserable. They’re headed back to California, home to 5 of the top 10 greenest cities in the US (Austin ain’t one of them), including #1 San Francisco, many joining the AI revolution in San Francisco, in a state with the largest number of Fortune 500 companies. The SF Bay Area also has 49% of all big tech engineers and 27% of startup engineers in the USA. That talent pool in SF has also grown, rather than declined, since 2022, meaning the right-wing, conservative chatter that San Francisco was past its peak is BS. SF is where clean air is valued, not petroleum and polluting factories. Many have moved their companies to San Francisco, not from San Francisco. And true to form, the office space demand in San Francisco for office space under 20,000sq/ft is hotter than ever.
To meet the demand in SF, new buildings, such as a new 41 story office/resedential complex, the redone, iconic TransAmerica Pyramid, and a 47 story resedential complex and a 72 story residential tower, are going-up in downtown SF. Walk through downtown San Francisco and you’ll even find the latest generation of geosynchronous small satellites, which will put Starlink out of business, being designed and manufactured at Astranis’ headquarters. When it’s about 110 deg F in Austin, where everybody hibernates inside for about 5 months straight during the summer, the people of San Francisco are outside, partying and building their businesses. Then winter hits Austin. It’s cold, dank, and the trees are barren. The place is brown, and the severe drought doesn’t help.
About 6.1 million square feet of office space is empty in downtown Austin. Austin’s commercial vacancy rate hit a staggering 30 percent in the third quarter 2023. Houston, Austin, and Dallas lead the nation in empty offices, twice that of New York and San Francisco. Austin is part of the Texas Triangle of Doom. High rise buildings in Texas are in trouble. In addition to Tesla and Oracle leaving Austin, companies in Austin like Indeed, which laid-off 2,000 employees in Austin last year in 2023 with more happening in 2024, are ridding themselves of employees at high rates. All tech sectors are affected.
In Austin, part of one of the most dangerous states in the country with increasing rates of firearm deaths, a supposed tech hotspot, they hold a tech conference, and the attendees boo tech. And if you’re looking for a city with great live music, San Diego, CA has more live music venues than Austin, Texas in addition to being the most green city and the most biodiverse city in the US, along with being the 4th largest tech hub behind San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. Austin, besides being land-locked and known for its bad weather and flooding, and the home of conservative, Trump-loving nutjobs such as Greg Abbott, Alex Jones, and Matthew McConaughey, let’s have a look at a few more reasons why Austin is attracting few and losing many tech jobs.
Tesla Cybertruck, built in Texas, being towed by diesel truck
Musk Kills Everything He Makes in Austin, Texas
Everything Musk does in Texas dies – the Cybertruck, the Tesla Semi, Starship, the 4680 Battery, and the Boring Co. For example, the 4680 batteries (made by Panasonic for Tesla) are more expensive, slower charging, and have less energy density than the old 2170 batteries developed by Panasonic. Tesla continues to crash, and another round of layoffs, the 4th in 4 weeks, underscores Tesla’s dimming prospects under Musk. Success for Tesla arose in California when two engineers, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, and their team created Tesla and it’s successful technologies. Musk was given at least $64 million Texas taxpayer dollars to build his factory in Texas, and in return he creates an environmental disaster. California still has twice as many Tesla employees than does Texas, and the jobs are much higher paying in CA. The history of economic development incentives shows that communities often give up more than they receive.
To return Tesla to doing something successful, as it did under Eberhard and Tarpenning in CA, Musk returned the HQ of Tesla back to CA. Such a shit show is Tesla now, Musk had to lay-off 10% of his workers, and the it’s only becoming worse. It’s a shame what Musk has done to a successful company, thanks to Martin and Marc, that once, but no longer, had a huge lead in the electric car space.
Musk neither founded Tesla nor developed any of its technologies. Similar for SpaceX. Musk cofounded SpaceX with Tom Mueller, an engineer, who developed the SpaceX technologies along with his engineering team- and Musk doesn’t manage SpaceX. If he did, it would have died long ago.
Oracle Leaves Austin, Texas
Take the Texas Money and Run, Larry Ellison
Now Oracle has left Austin after having been given millions of dollars from Texas taxpayers – Tennessee has given billionaire Larry Ellison $250 million of its taxpayer’s dollars to move to the land of the KKK, Nashville. In turn, Ellison sends Texan’s money to Israel to continue its genocide. You can’t make this stuff up! Truth is stranger than fiction.
Meanwhile the schools in Texas are absolute garbage, and running out of money. Public schools have been privatized and these privateers are actually taking Texas taxpayer’s dollars and sending the money out of state. Talk about a moronic, mismanaged state with Greg Abbott at the helm.
Austin, Texas Technology Accelerator, Newchip, Kills Entrepreneur’s Companies
Lacey Hunter had big dreams as she put her startup through the three-month Newchip accelerator program. Startups spent thousand of dollars, up to $20,000 for its training programs. and here’s the killer. Startups also granted Newchip the right to buy $250,000 worth of shares in the company at a later date, but at their current valuation, presumably at much lower cost before the startup achieves success and the valuation greatly increases. This type of deal is known as a warrant.
Here’s the killer. Newchip filed for bankruptcy in May 2023. Things went from bad to worse later that year when Lacey Hunter discovered warrants of her company — rights to buy an ownership stake — had become part of the proceedings, which ultimately forced her to shut down her company. Newchip has hurt many other entrepreneurs in Austin.
Silicon Valley in California is the king of tech, but even San Diego has a much bigger tech scene than Austin. During 2023, San Diego startups netted more money than Austin, featuring companies that make solar automobiles, semiconductors, drones, autonomous vehicles, lithium ion battery technologies, lithium ion extraction technologies, lithium ion batteries, and robots, for example. Funding of start-ups in San Diego has increased by 84% over the last year. A huge tech sector in San Diego is anchored by giants like Qualcomm, General Atomics, Dexcom, Cymer, Illumina, Teradata, Cubic, ViaSat, and the 3rd largest biotech hub in the country. And just north of San Diego is Los Angeles, with its even larger tech scene, espeically in aerospace.
The hype is over, and the few tech workers who moved to Austin are returning to California, joining other tech workers who are moving there from other places and joining entities such as General Motors’ new 50,000 sq/ft tech center in Mountain View, as the billionaires move anywhere that will give them hundreds of millions of taxpayer’s dollars.
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 