I’ve been covering some of these issues since all the way back when I was doing the Texas vs. California updates, but this video offers a nice summary.
“Texas has been one of the biggest winners of the blue state exodus, and now it’s pushing to become a real financial powerhouse.”
“If Texas were its own country, its economy would be the eighth largest in the world. Bigger than Russia, bigger than Canada, bigger than Italy. That’s the state’s preliminary 2025 GDP, $2.9 trillion, measured against every other nation on Earth.”
“Goldman Sachs is building an 800,000 square foot campus in Dallas. When it opens, more than 5,000 people will work there. It’ll be the firm’s second largest office in the United States. Goldman isn’t moving its headquarters, but between 2015 and 2024, 314 companies did. Nearly half of them, 154, went to Dallas Fort Worth. By 2026, Texas had 57 Fortune 500 headquarters, more than any other state, with about $2.8 trillion in combined annual revenue.”
“The state that outsiders picture as a ranch currently produces the world’s richest person and the world’s richest woman at the same time. Elon Musk, based in Austin, is worth $839 billion. Alice Walton, based in Fort Worth, is worth $134 billion and has held the top spot amongst women for three straight years.”
“Forbes counted 43 Texans on its 2025 list of America’s 400 richest people worth more than $1 trillion combined, the first time the group has cleared the mark.”
“Dallas Fort Worth does finance and corporate services. Houston does energy, chemicals, and ports. Austin does technology and semiconductors. San Antonio does military, healthcare, and manufacturing.”
“Those four metros sit inside a triangle bounded by Interstate 35, Interstate 45, and Interstate 10. Together, they employ more than 10 million people, more than the entire workforce of Sweden, and run about 2 trillion a year in a combined economic output. Over the last decade, 85% of all Texas population growth happened inside that triangle, which is why the state can carry finance, energy, technology, and manufacturing investment all at the same time.”
“Oil still anchors the biggest of those four economies. In 2025, Texas pumped 5.75 million barrels of crude oil a day, 42% of all US production. If Texas were a country, it would rank fourth in the world in oil output behind only the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.”
“Texas is the only state that spent nine years as its own sovereign nation, the Republic of Texas. from 1836 to 1845, before voting to join the union.”
“That history still shows up in how the state regulates business today. No state income tax, a right to work law, and a legal and regulatory environment built to keep the cost of doing business low.”
“Chief Executive Magazine has ranked Texas the best state in the country for business every year since the survey started in 2001.”
Fort Worth rent is less than half that of Manhattan.
“Since February 2020, finance, insurance, and real estate employment in Dallas grew 23.2% versus 6% in New York City. Dallas now has about 317,000 people working across those sectors, 10.1% of local employment, just above New York City’s 9.9%.”
“New York Stock Exchange Texas says Texas headquartered companies listed on the exchange represent more than 5 trillion in market value, up 1.5 trillion in a year.”
“Texas is also becoming a place where capital intensive companies build physical things at a scale most states can’t host. Samsung is spending more than 37 billion on two logic fabs and an R&D fab near Austin, with the first set to begin production this year. Texas Instruments is spending up to $40 billion on four connected fabs in Sherman, part of a $60 billion commitment the company calls the largest in US semiconductor history. Between those two projects alone, more than $77 billion in committed capital is going into two Texas counties.”
“Once you can manufacture at that scale, the parts have to come from somewhere. For Texas, the answer is 150 miles south. Port Laredo handled $353 billion in trade in 2025. More than 97% of it tied to Mexico, making it the busiest inland port in the Western Hemisphere. Mexico passed China in 2023 to become America’s largest trading partner.”
“Companies assemble AI hardware in Mexico using Nvidia chips, then just ship it north through Texas.”
“All of that growth is now straining the infrastructure underneath it. Dallas Fort Worth became the third largest collocation data center market in the country in the first quarter of 2026, with capacity up 43.7% in a single year, and 88% of what’s under construction has already been pre-leased.”
“ERCOT was tracking roughly 410 gawatt of proposed large loads seeking grid connection by 2030. Enough that regulators changed how they study new loads.” Hence Texas Governor Greg Abbott telling data center companies they had to pay for their own data centers.
“Housing shows the same pressure. DFW home prices were up about 33% above 2020 levels by 2025. In Austin, it was about 23%.” Maybe, but Austin experienced a huge housing price spike in 2021-2023 before coming down again.
“In 2024, the state still authorized 225,000 new housing units, more than California and New York combined. In Dallas and Houston were the two busiest metro areas in the country for new home construction.”
“This shows that capital trusts Texas can build.”
“From the 1990s through the 2010s, Texas competed on cost. Cheap land, cheap labor, no income tax.”
“From 2015 to 2020, corporate migration accelerated on that same cost advantage.”
“From 2020 to 2024, COVID, remote workers, and a wave of relocations turned migration into a flood. Texas added residents faster than any other state.”
“From 2024 to 2026, finance, AI, infrastructure, semiconductors, manufacturing, and logistics arrived on top of that migration at a scale the cost argument alone would have never attracted. Texas isn’t competing on cost anymore. It’s competing on scale, on the ecosystem that scale builds around itself.”
“Tesla announced Gigafactory Texas in 2020 with more than one billion of expected investment, moved its headquarters to Austin in 2021, and had about $2.7 billion in Travis County by 2022.”
“Then Musk’s other company did something bigger. SpaceX went public in June 26 at $135 a share, raising about $75 billion, the largest IPO in history.” Actually, $86 billion. “And Musk crossed a trillion dollars in net worth within minutes of the open. More than 4,400 current and former SpaceX employees became millionaires the same day the company listed and roughly 400 of them cleared 100 million or more.”
“Dallas has the labor pool, the exchanges, and nearly half of the headquarters that moved here. Sherman and Taylor have the fabs. Laredo has the border. The Permian still pumps more oil than any other basin in the country. Every new campus, every new fab, every new resident adds another user to the infrastructure underneath it.”
“That’s what Goldman is buying here. A seat in the place where American capital is choosing to live for the next 20 years.”
Somehow he failed to mention that Republicans have held every statewide office in Texas for closing in on 30 years…