Recently minted world’s richest man, Elon Musk has plenty of reasons to be in the headlines lately.
His SpaceX company has been trying some super difficult things with its Starship design, resulting in some huge explosions . Tesla announced it would start accepting payments in bitcoin, as well as making a $1.5 billion investment in the cryptocurrency. And Musk himself put up a $100 million prize towards the development of carbon capture technology in a four-year competition to be managed by the XPrize team.
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As if that all wasn’t enough, Musk put on his prognosticator’s hat on an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast to suggest that the place to be in the U.S. in the future is none other than Austin, Texas.
It’s not exactly a coincidence that Musk has some serious stake in Austin’s future.
Last year, some significant differences of opinion over California’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic — which temporarily shuttered Tesla’s production facility in Fremont — led Musk to quit the state in favor of Texas.
Tesla also happened to select Austin as the site of its new, $1 billion factory to produce the Cybertruck, a decision that Musk attributed to both its culture, saying that “Austin is a bit like mini California,” and to his employees. As he told Rogan, he polled Tesla’s workers on where they’d ideally like to see the company’s new plant, and the “number one choice was Austin.”
So far, it seems Musk is a fan of the Lone Star State.
Reduced government regulations as well as the absence of state income taxes seem to have paid off for the mega-billionaire, and he thinks plenty of people will want to follow in his wake.
So, on the Joe Rogan Experience, Musk predicted that Austin will benefit from far more than just Tesla’s presence. “It’s going to be the biggest boomtown that America has seen in 50 years at least — megaboom,” he told Rogan.
And, indeed, Tesla isn’t the only California company to explore new life in Austin.
Software giant Oracle, for example, announced it would be leaving Silicon Valley, where it had been founded back in 1977, to set up shop in Austin, Insider reported. Other tech giants like IBM, Dell, and Samsung all have large presences in Austin as well.
Experts say it’s not all about taxes, but quality of life and cost of living expenses, and finding locations like Austin where companies can pay employees less but still improve their living situations.
“[When] you look at an Austin: It’s creating a mini Silicon Valley at half the cost for an average employee,” Dan Ives, a Wedbush Securities financial analyst, told NBC News .
But despite Musk’s enthusiasm for Austin, he had some cautionary thoughts about the Silicon Valley exodus as well.
“I think we do need to make sure that … people who move here from California don’t inadvertently recreate the issues that caused them to move in the first place,” he told Rogan.
In addition to cost of living benefits, outside Silicon Valley and California, companies don’t have to abide by some of the state’s regulations that they find burdensome, like laws that require certain numbers of women to sit on a company’s board of directors.
Musk raised eyebrows with a few of his other comments to Rogan as well.
For one, he mused on developing capability for the new Tesla Roadster to hover, “without, you know, killing people.”
“Maybe it can hover like a meter above the ground, or something like that,” he suggested. “If you plummet it’ll blow out the suspension but you’re not gonna die.”
Check out the full interview on Spotify .
