California Dethroned: Fortune 500 Crown Goes to Texas

The 2026 Fortune 500 list shows Texas leading California in Fortune 500 companies 57-56.

Data from the 2026 Fortune 500 list show Texas leading with 57 headquarters, compared with California’s 56, marking a reversal from two years ago, when California held the lead, Fox Business reports.

“Additionally, corporations in Texas generated $2.8 trillion in revenue, while those in California reported $2.7 trillion in revenue.”

“Texas is the undisputed headquarters of headquarters,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a press statement. “The world’s leading businesses invest with confidence in Texas because of our welcoming business climate, predictable regulatory environment, and skilled and growing workforce. People and businesses are choosing Texas because Texas works.”

California has been bleeding residents and their tax revenue for many years with moves to states with no income tax or very low income tax: Florida, Texas, Arizona, Idaho, Tennessee, South Carolina, Nevada, and even Washington State. And this isn’t “California Derangement Syndrome” as Gov. Gavin Newsom claims. This is the economic reality by businesses to California’s toxic business climate.

While California has been losing small, medium and large businesses for years due to high taxation and business killing regulations, there is another problem in paradise: California billionaires are leaving the state in record numbers, and taking their billions with them. According to one billionaire, more than $1 Trillion has already left.

California Democrats are pushing a retroactive billionaire tax targeting the roughly 220 billionaires residing in California in 2025, ignoring that these individuals are the most financially mobile and can live anywhere. Expecting them to remain in the state as if they will happily and willingly hand over even more of their wealth surely must be facetious.

And Gov. Gavin Newsom is doing nothing to oppose the billionaire tax, which is a position in and of itself.

SEIU is sponsoring the “2026 Billionaires Tax Act.” The measure will impose a one-time 5% tax on individual wealth exceeding $1 billion, Marc Joffe wrote for the Globe.

One-time tax… right.

Chamath Palihapitiya posted this warning to X in January:

Unfortunate update as of today: More calls from friends. The total wealth that has left California is now $1T. We had $2T of billionaire wealth just a few weeks ago. Now, 50% of that wealth has left – taking their income tax revenue, sales tax revenue, real estate tax revenue and all their staffs (and their salaries and income taxes) with them. In other words, by starting this ill conceived attempt at an asset tax, the California budget deficit will explode. And we still don’t know if the tax will even make the ballot. California billionaires were reliable tax payers – 13.3% every year. They were the sheep you could shear forever. Now California will lose this revenue source FOREVER. Unless this ballot initiative is pulled, we will not stop the billionaire exodus. With no rich people left in California, the middle class will have to foot the bill.

As we reported, entrepreneur David Sacks weighed in explaining, “To be clear, the Billionaire Tax Act in California is not (just) an unrealized gains tax. It’s a 5% across-the-board confiscation of net worth. It applies even if one has already realized and paid taxes on the entire amount.”

This is double taxation and unconstitutional, and California’s billionaires know it.

Gov. Gavin Newsom might find that lowering tax rates results in higher rather than lower tax revenues, as the Laffer Curve has shown time and time again.

Art Laffer, who created the Laffer curve, an economic hypothesis that shows the relationship between tax rates and the amount of tax revenue collected by governments, left California more than two decades ago for Tennessee. The Laffer curve shows that there is a certain point between 0% and 100% where tax revenues are maximized. He saw it coming and tried to warn us.

California’s out-migration exceeds inbound migration, as U-Haul’s January report shows. More Californians rented one-way U-Haul trucks to leave the state in 2025, than residents of any other state.

California’s own Chevron Oil Company moved its headquarters to Houston, Texas from San Ramon, CA where it has been based since 1879, one of the biggest businesses to flee the Golden State. Chevron is in good company joining X/Twitter, Space X, Oracle, Hewlett Packard, Charles Schwab, and Toyota Motor North America, Nissei America, Inc., Yamaha Motor Corp. U.S.A., The Joe Rogan Experience, Gordon Ramsay North America, The Rubin Report, Ruiz Foods, Blue Diamond Growers, Leprino Foods, Anheuser-Busch, GAF Energy, to name just a few of the businesses leaving California because of the state’s leftist/Marxist politics and regulatory environment.

As the Globe reported earlier this year, California ranks dead last once again in Chief Executive Magazine’s Best & Worst States For Business 2025 – the 14th year in a row. Tennessee ranks #1 once again, and “The Volunteer State” was the recipient of another of California’s oldest and one of the best known businesses in the country: After 77 Years in California, In-N-Out moved to Tennessee.

Where did these companies go?

Most went to Texas for its “business-friendly climate—with no corporate or personal income tax—along with a highly skilled and diverse workforce, easy access to global markets, robust infrastructure and a reasonable regulatory environment,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said when he announced that California-based Ruiz Foods was moving its corporate HQ to Frisco. “With an unrivaled business climate and skilled, diverse workforce, Texas is America’s #1 economic destination….”

And California is not.