Other major companies that have decided to relocate to the southern state from California include technology company Oracle.
By EFE
Oil giant Chevron, one of the largest energy companies in the U.S. and the world, is moving its headquarters from California to Texas, joining a wave of businesses that have decided to relocate to the southern state in recent years.
The company said it expects to move all of its corporate operations to Houston, where it already has about 7,000 employees, within the next five years.
The company’s management will be in Texas by the end of the year, Chevron said in a statement, leaving behind the now former headquarters in San Ramon, outside San Francisco.
In an interview with CNBC, the oil company’s CEO, Mike Wirth, said that the decision to move the company was not due to a “political dispute” with California and stressed that the Texas city of Houston is the “epicenter” of the oil industry.
Chevron joins a long list of thousands of businesses and companies that have decided to move to Texas in recent years, motivated by the state’s low taxes, few regulations and rapid economic growth, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Business mogul Elon Musk is perhaps the most visible face of this trend: this year, he decided to move the headquarters of his companies SpaceX and X from California to Texas, where he already moved his flagship company, Tesla, since 2021.
Musk is not the only one who has decided to leave the “Golden State,” as California is known: between 2019 and 2020, more than 44,000 jobs moved from this region to Texas, which represents more than 15% of all positions that moved to the state.
With this, California became the state with the largest number of job losses in the entire country and Texas became the main destination for businesses leaving there, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, published in February of this year.
Other major companies that have decided to relocate to the southern state from California include tech giant Oracle, now based in Austin, financial services company Charles Schwab and consulting firm AECOM.
With this, Texas is now the second state – tied with New York – that hosts the most Fortune 500 companies: with 52 companies, second only to California, with 57.
