These investors and CEOs left California and New York for Dallas

There are the billionaires and businesses who are loud about moving to Texas to escape high taxes.

Blockchain.com co-CEO Lane Kasselman moved from the San Francisco Bay Area because of a spreadsheet.

The idea came from Blockchain.com CEO Peter Smith, who suggested Kasselman use data analysis to decide where his family would move next. 

School and food quality, housing availability and airport access were all factors inserted into the spreadsheet. To Kasselman’s surprise, Dallas scored the highest number of points. 

Two years after he moved, Blockchain.com’s U.S. headquarters relocated from Miami to Dallas and hired more than two dozen employees for Texas.

While generational real estate and oil and gas money still dominate Dallas’ richest circles, the city has drawn a wave of wealthy executives in finance, tech and alternative investing from the coasts. The trend has accelerated since 2020 but has gone on for much longer, fueled in part by the allure of Texas’ lower taxes and friendlier business regulations.

Related: Here’s how rich Texans are passing down wealth to heirs

Newcomers are bringing their wealth and employees from states like California, New York and Washington with them, broadening the kinds of industries that make up Dallas’ business community. 

Fortress Investment Group co-CEO Drew McKnight, DTX Ventures general partner John Redgrave, Fisher Investments CEO Damian Ornani, Dude Perfect CEO Andrew Yaffe, tech investment firm Disruptive’s chief strategy officer Ash Spiegelberg and Kasselman are among those who have moved from coastal states, with most of them from California. 

Some of them sought lower overall living costs or a city with a less left-leaning culture. Others came for job opportunities or, like Kasselman, for quality of life reasons. 

“It’s really quite an interesting moment for our company because on one hand you’ve got the state which is very welcoming of the digital asset and crypto sector,” Kasselman said. “And on the other side, you’ve got the D-FW Metroplex, which has an incredible concentration of financial services professionals in every sort of category.”

Although billionaires such as Peter Thiel, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have made high-profile splits with California, RBC private wealth consultant Dean Deutz cautions against using those examples to make broader statements that wealthy people are fleeing the coasts en masse.

“It’s in the 5 percent or less that are considering it, and less than that that are doing it,” said Deutz. “Five percent is still a lot of people, and that’s impacting the tax revenues in those states. But it’s not everyone.”

Related: Texas drops in Top States For Business ranking but still ranks among top 5

Those who do move are having an outsized impact on Dallas’ economic makeup, said Cullum Clark, a Southern Methodist University economist. Many of them came with a wave of high-profile business relocations in the last 10 years.

“The income is moving faster to Texas than people are, in the sense that people who move typically have considerably higher than average income,” Clark said. “You get a bigger shift of incomes than you do of actual people from all this movement.”

Between the filing years of 2021 and 2023, 189,363 people moved from California to Texas with an adjusted gross income of nearly $12.7 billion, according to data from the Internal Revenue Service. Over that same period, 80,264 people moved from Texas to California.

Some CEOs who didn’t have Dallas on their radar say they have found Dallas’ business community refreshing.

Kasselman is from Los Angeles but his family moved two years ago from the San Francisco Bay Area. Without jobs that required him and his wife to stay, they were considering moving to LA or New York City, but were open to other options. 

“Two years in, the data was right,” Kasselman said. “We can’t imagine living anywhere else. Everyone in my family is thriving.”

There are now around 30 Blockchain.com employees in Dallas. Before he moved, there was one.

Kasselman expected most of his business peers to have ties to oil and gas, but his impression of Dallas quickly evolved. Upon arriving, he was impressed by the booming financial sector and surprised by the significant presence of Dallas’ family offices for the ultrawealthy.

“There’s been some real intentional efforts by several of the more notable families in Dallas to really create a financial epicenter in Dallas, and it’s worked,” Kasselman said. 

Related: Inside the world of family offices: How ultrarich dealmakers invest billions

Dallas’ startup culture was another refreshing feature for Kasselman. In northern California, the locus of venture capital, he felt startups were often funded before there was evidence they would succeed. In Texas, he’s seen more funders invest under the assumption a company will generate capital more quickly.

“That culture, which is more pragmatic than sort of like venture fantasy [is] much more aligned with my values,” said Kasselman.

Moving to Dallas in 2025 was not an easy decision for New Yorker Yaffe, CEO of Dude Perfect, a Frisco-based group of sports and comedy influencers. Yaffe spent almost a decade working for the NBA. He moved to Dallas after taking The Dude Perfect gig, and he and his family are glad he did.

“There’s just a sense of opportunity in North Texas that doesn’t exist in other areas and there’s a camaraderie,” Yaffe said. “People feel like the business community is rooting for them here.”

Although the sports media and entertainment industry is smaller in Dallas than it was in New York, Yaffe said it’s tight-knit and growing as more influencers — especially golfers — move to the area. Dude Perfect’s 80,000-square-foot space in Frisco would have been tough to find at a reasonable price in New York or Los Angeles, Yaffe said.

Related: ‘Fore’ the likes: North Texas spawns some of golf’s biggest influencers

Many wealthy CEOs are drawn to Texas for its business policies.

Ornani, CEO of Fisher Investments, worked out of California for 40 years before moving to Texas in 2018.

In 2023, Fisher Investments announced they were moving their headquarters from the state of Washington to Plano after the Washington Supreme Court upheld a capital gains tax on its wealthiest residents. 

The company released a statement in response: “In honor of the Washington State Supreme Court’s wisdom and knowledge of the law, and in recognition of whatever it may do next, Fisher Investments is immediately moving its headquarters from Washington State to Texas.”

Ornani said in an email California had business policies that made it hard for him to run Fisher Investments, which was headquartered in California before moving to Washington.

“People and businesses can vote with their feet,” Ornani said.

McKnight, co-CEO of Fortress, which still has a presence in California and is co-headquartered in New York, said he moved because of the benefits of living in Texas, not because of any problems he had with California. 

The initial impetus for his move was that he and his wife wanted to raise their kids closer to her family and thought that Dallas was a good place to bring them up. Since moving from the San Francisco Bay Area in 2020, he has been impressed by the state’s “pro-business” atmosphere.

McKnight said Ross Perot Jr.’s Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport and Gov. Greg Abbott’s work on the Texas Stock Exchange demonstrates that Texas is a prime place for investors like him. Fortress was a founding investor in TXSE.

Abbott, McKnight said, has indicated Texas’ government wants to make it easy to do business, list, go public and take away the friction costs.

“One of the things that’s unique about Dallas is their leadership over many decades,” said McKnight. “You’ve got both political leaders, but also business leaders, and business visionaries invested in infrastructure.”

Many Fortress employees from other states followed McKnight soon after his move, including the late former co-CEO Joshua Pack and co-head of corporate credit Brian Stewart. The firm now has about 150 employees in Dallas. 

It’s not just business regulations that spur moves. High costs as well as cultural misalignments have led investors and business leaders to leave coastal states for Dallas.

“California hammers you on taxes,” said Redgrave, who was an early Palantir employee and sold two AI companies to Apple and Discord before working at DTX.

In 2021, Redgrave and his family moved to a small East Texas town near his wife’s family. Now in Dallas, Redgrave said the price he paid for his big University Park home was similar to the price of his 2,000 square-foot starter home in Menlo Park, Calif.

Related: See North Texas’ newest multimillion-dollar home listings

“Palantir went public right as I was leaving. I had sold a company and done pretty well with that,” Redgrave said. “I still felt like economically, I was in a challenging position, which is just a crazy thing to say out loud because the truth was like I was economically quite advantaged.”

Even though personal matters spurred his move, Redgrave said Texas is an easier place to build for the defense and manufacturing-focused businesses he invests in.

On the nonregulatory front, Redgrave at times felt as though he had to hide his Christian beliefs and his stances as a moderate conservative to be palatable to those around him. He said he wanted to be somewhere more open to civic debates over tricky topics like politics and religion. 

The education system made him more frustrated.

“We started to look at schools for our kids, and it felt like the actual education was really secondary to the social issues that the school really wanted to push,” Redgrave said.

Related: Texas requires Bible readings on literary list, embeds Christianity in public school curriculum

Tech investor Spiegelberg and Redgrave also said they didn’t feel people around them or officials in San Francisco valued public safety shortly after the pandemic. Redgrave said the San Francisco area felt like a “dumpster fire” before he left.

On top of that, mask requirements made them feel isolated. Spiegelberg described them as “draconian.”

When Spiegelberg moved to Dallas for the first time in 2014, he knew few other transplants.

After a stint in San Francisco, the London native moved back to Dallas in 2022 while working for global advisory firm Brunswick Group for a second time and found a plethora of transplants like him. He organizes regular get-togethers through a group chat with other tech, finance and venture capital guys, many of whom moved to Dallas from California and New York.

“Everything just felt a bit easier here,” said Spiegelberg.

Despite people leaving, California and New York remain important places for business. 

Silicon Valley and San Francisco are still the dominant hubs for AI, technology and venture capital. California overall attracted more than $335 billion this year in venture capital funding, according to Pitchbook data reported by the Los Angeles Times. New York raised less than a tenth of that, and Texas raised 1/40th.

Although Redgrave thinks Dallas has potential as a startup hub with its history of business moguls, he said it still has ways to go.

“Dallas has incredible capital but not as much talent density that wants to go and build companies,” Redgrave said.

Several wealthy people change their minds about moving to Texas when they begin planning, said Deutz with RBC. Those seeking lower taxes sometimes want to keep homes in multiple states but get turned off by the logistics, such as tallying days spent in each state or making sure they don’t buy resident fishing and hunting licenses in the wrong state.

He works with people who are hesitant to leave social circles, doctors and their golf clubs, Deutz added. He said people like living in places with seasons, while Texas’ weather can be unpalatable.

Related: A day in the North Texas heat, told hour by hour

Despite the downside of moving, more coastal transplants are headed Dallas’ way. Goldman Sachs will spend an estimated $709 million on its campus in Uptown. Morgan Stanley is closely eyeing Dallas for a $1.3 billion high-rise that would serve as a regional hub for the investment banking giant.

The influx has changed Dallas and will continue to change it. Clark, the economist, said transplants have made Dallas’ business community more cosmopolitan and less insular. More practically, he said housing prices will likely rise.

Dallas may also change those who move here — in all kinds of ways, Blockchain.com’s Kasselman said.

“We joke that our group of friends will get together for dinner and nobody ever flakes, which is incredible when you have a group of a dozen former Californians and New Yorkers,” said Kasselman.