Oracle: Not Going to Take it Any More

In the latest blow to the Bay Area economy, Oracle is moving its headquarters from Redwood Shores to Austin.

Oracle HQ at Redwood Shores, 2004

2017: Buildings added, plus marine craft.

Oracle joins numerous Bay Area companies that have moved their headquarters to Texas in recent years or months, including Charles Schwab, McKesson and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Other companies, including Apple and Dropbox, are keeping their Silicon Valley headquarters, but expanding their presence in Texas...

Oracle occupies 3.5 million square feet of Silicon Valley office space, concentrated in its Redwood Shores complex, Santa Clara and San Jose. The company has listed 263,000 square feet for lease at Redwood Shores and 449,810 square feet for lease in Santa Clara, according to marketing materials.

Its name is on the Giants’ ballpark in San Francisco, a deal that runs through 2039.

The company opened its Austin campus in 2018 and said it would eventually house 10,000 employees there. It leases 1.3 million square feet in the Texas city, according to real estate data firm CoStar. Oracle has 135,000 total employees and a market capitalization of $182.5 billion...

[Chris Thornberg of Beacon Economics] said the “preposterous degrees of regulation and controls,” coupled with the lack of affordable housing could be reasons. And the pandemic has only worsened the economic outlook, with state-level regulations constantly moving goalposts.

Oracle founder Larry Ellison is one of those colorful billionaires who likes to make waves, figuratively and literally, by competing in the America's Cup, building a distinctive glass corporate headquarters, and buying the island of Lanai. Now he's moving his company headquarters, which is not a decision to be made lightly given all the personnel, financial, and legal agreements that have to be broken, initiated, and renegotiated.

Oracle is the largest company yet to move out of California. Its market capitalization of $182 billion makes it the 13th most valuable company in the Bay Area and the 34th most valuable in the country (see table below).

With the tax base eroding and environmentalists and socialists tightening their grip, look for California's taxes and "preposterous" regulations only to increase. There's an excellent chance that Oracle will not be the last of the top-15 Bay Area companies to leave, and I hope I'm wrong.