In the northern area of California, south of San Francisco, more specifically in the areas of San José, Sunnyvale and Palo Alto, starting from the 70s the myth of Silicon Valley began to form: the capital of high technology, innovation and, more recently, social media. In a short time it became the place where tech companies could achieve success, attracting thousands of startups and the largest companies in the industry at the same time. It was a bit like Hollywood for aspiring actors. And it still is, at least for the moment. Facebook, Apple, Google are all based there.
In the last period, however, partly because of the pandemic and partly due to other reasons, rumors that the era of the Silicon Valley has almost come to an end are becoming increasingly insistent. In fact, several experts argue that the effects of the pandemic have been devastating. As it happened everywhere in the world, company employees kept working from home, emptying their offices as a result. The problem is that some of the companies are saying that they want to use smartworking even after the pandemic is over. Sources inside Google, for example, report that the company’s employees will be able to stay at home until July 2021 and that a “flexible working week” will likely be introduced later on. Another company bent on doing something similar is Twitter. The CEO, Jack Dorsey, made it known that the idea would be to make remote working permanent.
There are those who are already building their home elsewhere. Among them is Elon Musk, founder of Paypal, SpaceX and Tesla Motors. During a conference organized by the Wall Street Journal, Musk announced that although there are “great things in California,” he would be moving to Texas, where he has already started working on several projects. Although for the moment it seems that this is only a personal transfer, there is every reason to think that his companies will follow suit. Other companies have already taken the same initiative, such as Oracle, operating in the cloud computing sector, the artificial intelligence company Palantir and even the first company settling in Silicon Valley, back in 1939, Hewlett-Packard.
Contributing to this phenomenon are certainly the many expenses that have those who live in the state of California and the natural disasters that keep affecting the country. On the one hand, therefore, there are high taxes and generally one of the most expensive cost of living in the world and, on the other hand, the fires that continue to devastate the area every year, worsening the quality of life. If we add to this that, not so far away from the Californian region, there is a state like Texas that has a much lower cost of living and a more favorable taxation, it is easy to think that a new Silicon Valley could arise in the state of western landscapes.
