Since the beginning of the pandemic, the technology elite and large firms like HP and Oracle have started to move out of the Bay Area.
Palantir, Oracle and HP moved their headquarters to other states, and Elon Musk, Drew Houston, Larry Ellison and Keith Rabois decided to leave for cities like Austin and Miami.
Although the exodus may seem sudden, it is the direct result of a cultural conflict that has been simmering beneath the surface for years.
This dates back to at least 2017, when Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey was removed from Facebook because of news that he was funding a group of anti-Hillary Clinton memes.
That same year, Google engineer James Damore was fired after writing an anti-diversity memo.
Both situations showed a growing population of technology workers fed up with the region’s culture. Now, more than three years later, the pandemic appears to have freed those who are frustrated by the culture of Silicon Valley from leaving the area forever.
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The exodus from Silicon Valley is real.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, billionaires, venture capitalists and even large technology companies like HP and Oracle have started to flee the Bay Area. What at first seemed like a unique response to our new reality of remote work has become a trend: the tech elite is stepping out and citing a mix of high taxes, state regulations and a homogeneous and liberal culture as their reasons for moving to Texas , Colorado or Florida.
Although the departures of Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and Keith Rabois are new, the reasons that seem to have pushed them out date back years. The pandemic may have spurred a migration away from the West Coast, but the writing is on the wall as early as 2017.
Now, as we approach 2021, it looks like a long-standing cultural conflict is finally coming to a head.
Read More: The tech elite is abandoning Silicon Valley en masse because of ‘monoculture’ and high taxes – that’s where they’re going
Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and Anduril in 2018.
Pedro Fiúza / NurPhoto via Getty Images
The beginning of the so-called cultural wars
While the facets of Silicon Valley culture are likely to have fragmented several years before 2017, the most public instance of a culture shock roughly coincides with the beginning of President Donald Trump’s presidency.
In September 2016, Palmer Luckey, the then-millionaire co-founder of 24-year-old virtual reality company Oculus, was discovered as the primary benefactor behind a group of anti-Hillary Clinton memes. By that time, Luckey had already sold Oculus to Facebook for $ 2 billion and launched the Oculus Rift, the company’s first major product.
According to reports from The Daily Beast, Luckey was funding a group called Nimble America, which described itself online as having proved “that the post is powerful and the magic of memes is real.” The group had put up a billboard in Pittsburgh with Clinton’s face that said “Too big for jail”.
Luckey told The Daily Beast at the time that funding the group “seemed like a really good time”.
After the report was published, several employees resigned from Facebook in protest and Luckey stayed out of the limelight at Oculus events. In March 2017, he left Facebook – in subsequent interviews, Luckey said he was fired.
Luckey’s departure was seen by some as a politically motivated dismissal. In 2018, Senator Ted Cruz asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during a Senate hearing, why Luckey was fired, implying that it was because of his policy, which Zuckerberg denied.
While this was the first and most public example of ideological differences becoming an obstacle in Silicon Valley, it was not the last.
In the same year, Google engineer James Damore made headlines for writing an anti-diversity manifesto that spread like wildfire in Google’s ranks. Damore argued that the search giant should not aim to increase racial and gender diversity among its employees, but rather to seek “ideological diversity”. Damore also argued that the gender difference in technology is due to the biological difference between men and women, not sexism.
The memo resulted in Damore’s resignation, but it also generated a wave of support among white Google engineers, who felt that diversity talks were offensive to white, conservative men. At the same time, far-right online communities began to reveal the identities of Google employees who identified themselves as part of the LGBTQ community. Damore then sued Google, claiming that the company discriminated against white, conservative men (Damore gave up later.)
Luckey and Damore were left without a job. But reactions to their situations and the support they both received highlighted that there was a growing population of technology workers fed up with the region’s culture. At the time, Steve Kovach of Business Insider argued that the Silicon Valley “liberal bubble” had burst and that cultural wars had started.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
Patrick Pleul / Alliance image via Getty Images
Millionaires and billionaires from technology are leaving the Bay Area en masse
More than three years later, it appears that this trend of dissatisfaction is coinciding with the side effects of the coronavirus pandemic.
In previous years, those who felt dissatisfied, rejected or otherwise excluded by Silicon Valley’s predominantly liberal culture had few options. They could leave, of course, but the technology world was still firmly rooted in the Bay Area. Those who wanted a career in technology still felt that they needed to endure skyrocketing rents and multi-hour travel.
But when offices closed and major technology companies asked employees to work remotely, there was no longer such a strong link with the Bay Area. Some companies, like Twitter and Slack, have released their employees to live wherever they want, with no expectations of returning to their San Francisco offices. Others, like Facebook, said employees can work remotely forever with manager approval.
Read More: An internal view of how Slack is planning to readjust salaries and retrain managers so employees can work from home forever
These decisions appear to have encouraged further change among the Silicon Valley elite.
Palantir moved its headquarters to Colorado and HP and Oracle went to Texas. Palantir CEO Alex Karp told Axios in May that the company wanted to move from the West Coast and described what it saw as “growing intolerance and monoculture” in the technology industry. Karp, meanwhile, lived in New Hampshire during much of the pandemic.
Since then, venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have moved to Austin – Lonsdale tweeted that the region was “more tolerant of ideological diversity” and Musk made the change after warring with California over the state’s coronavirus blockade measures.
Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison left the region for Lanai, the island he owns mainly in Hawaii, and investor Keith Rabois is moving to Miami, citing high taxes in San Francisco and a political culture he abhors as his reasons for leaving .
And, of course, all of these movements follow the famous departure of venture capitalist and founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, to Los Angeles in 2018, a movement apparently spurred by his dislike for the liberal ideology of Silicon Valley.
Notably, Lonsdale, Musk, Rabois and Karp have ties to Thiel and PayPal, and Ellison is a close friend of Musk and serves on Tesla’s board.
So, although the wave of departures from probably the most famous technology center in the world is, for better or worse, being stimulated by the pandemic, the exodus did not happen out of nowhere – it is a direct result of the political and ideological differences that have been building just below from the surface for years.
