Los Angeles is saying goodbye to another billionaire.
Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber Technologies Inc. and chief executive of ghost kitchens company City Storage Systems (which owns CloudKitchens), announced that he has left California.
“Let’s just be clear: on Dec. 18 I moved to Texas,” Kalanick said on the podcast Technology Business Programming Network. “I don’t know what’s so specific about Dec. 18, but let’s just say prior to January.”
Kalanick, whose net worth is estimated to be around $8.7 billion, moved out of California, just two weeks before he would have qualified for the proposed billionaire tax in the state. The proposed ballot measure calls for a one-time tax on 5% of the net worth from California’s billionaires to fund social services such as education, health care programs and food assistance.
The measure is still in its signature-gathering phase, but that hasn’t stopped California’s billionaires from acting prior to Jan. 1. Car loan tycoon Don Hankey moved from Malibu to Las Vegas, and Hollywood film director Steven Spielberg changed his primary residency from Los Angeles to New York. Silicon Valley tech billionaires like Google founder Sergey Brin and tech mogul Peter Thiel have moved to Florida, but not before donating millions to lobbyists that oppose the tax.
Predating serious discussion of the so-called “billionaires’ tax,” In-N-Out heiress Lynsi Snyder-Ellingson relocated from Glendora to Tennessee, in keeping with establishing the burger chain’s East Coast headquarters. Air Lease Corp. founder Steven Udvar-Hazy had also moved out of Beverly Park to Texas.
Company move
While a small handful of billionaires are moving their wealth out of California, there are still more than 200 billionaires that still reside in the state.
During the podcast interview, Kalanick also announced he was moving his ghost kitchens company out of California and renaming it Atoms, to focus more on industrial robotics. Despite the big move for himself and his company, he still plans on working with Bay Area’s tech enclave.
“But (for) the action for a lot of this Atoms-type technology I’m talking about, of course the Bay is a real thing,” he said.
The small billionaire departure from California mirrors another negligible exodus of businesses founded in the state. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, less than 2% of California’s headquarters left the state between 2011 and 2021. Moving headquarters also had an insignificant effect on the job market in the Golden State.
“Companies that move headquarters to other states do not appear to shrink non-headquarter employment in the state relative to firms whose headquarters stay in California,” the Public Policy Institute said in a 2025 brief.
