I live in Austin. Not Dallas. Dallas is cowboys and glass towers and a certain kind of Texas that's a bit too pleased with itself. But Texas as a whole? Texas is winning the 21st century. And most people in Europe have no idea it's even happening.
Let me give you three data points that should stop you in your tracks.
Fortune 500: Texas Has Overtaken New York
Fifty-four Fortune 500 companies now have their headquarters in Texas. That's more than New York. More than California. According to the Guardian, Dallas alone has overtaken New York as America's premier corporate address — a shift that would have seemed absurd a decade ago. Tesla. Oracle. AT&T. Dell. American Airlines. ExxonMobil. All Texas.
The exodus from California and New York isn't a trend anymore. It's a done deal.
And the reason isn't complicated. When a CEO moves from New York to Texas, he saves six percent in personal income tax on day one. No state income tax. No state corporate tax. Lower regulatory burden. A government that actively wants you there rather than treating you as a revenue source to be squeezed. Over time, those numbers compound into something very significant.
Texas Just Opened a Lobbying Office in London
Then there's this — and this is the part that genuinely surprised me.
Texas has opened an office in London. Not a tourism desk. A state-funded economic development office with one explicit mission: recruit British companies, banks, and investment houses and bring them to Texas. The offer is blunt — no state income tax, no state corporate tax, lower regulatory costs, expedited business courts, and direct subsidies for major employers.
London's Lady Mayor Susan Langley flew to Dallas in February 2026 to figure out how to respond. London flew to Texas. Not the other way around.
That tells you everything about where the gravitational centres of capital are shifting right now.
Texas Is Building Its Own Stock Exchange
And then there's the thing that impressed me most.
The Texas Stock Exchange — TXSE — is a fully regulated national securities exchange. Form 1 published and reviewed by the SEC. Backed by some of the largest financial institutions in the world. Built to go head-to-head with the NYSE and NASDAQ, two institutions that have enjoyed a near-duopoly over American public markets for decades.
The pitch is speed, lower costs, transparent rules, and modern infrastructure. It's live in 2026.
Somewhere between the political noise and the Texas clichés, a team of serious finance professionals built a complete alternative stock exchange infrastructure and filed it with the SEC. That is historically significant, and almost nobody in the DACH region is talking about it.
Headquarters: Dallas. Which I'll grudgingly admit is a fitting home for a stock exchange, given the city's particular fondness for financial theatre.
What This Actually Means If You're Reading This
Together, these three things tell a single story: Texas has stopped thinking like a state and started thinking like a sovereign economic power.
This matters enormously if you're a high-net-worth individual, an entrepreneur, or an investor sitting in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland trying to figure out where the world is going. The question isn't whether Texas is relevant to you. The question is whether you understand it well enough to act on it.
But I want to be straight with you, because I have no interest in selling you a fantasy.
America is expensive. Texas is expensive. Austin has seen living costs explode over the last decade — real estate, healthcare, private school fees, all of it painful. And the American market is competitive in a way that is genuinely different from Europe. There is no safety net, no regulatory cushion, no slow-moving bureaucracy to hide behind. If your business model barely works in Germany, it will not magically work better in Texas. The market is faster, the competition is hungrier, and clients expect more for less.
Texas is not a guaranteed fresh start. It is an exceptional opportunity for people who have the right profile — a scalable business or investment base, capital to deploy, genuine risk appetite, and the willingness to compete in a market where the rules are different and no one is waiting for you to catch up.
If that describes you, there is arguably no better place in the world right now.
Come to Texas With Me
I'm taking a small group to Austin to see this up close — not as tourists, but as business people. We'll look at structures, talk through tax realities, meet people who actually live and work there, and have proper one-on-one conversations about what a Texas strategy could look like for your specific situation.
The places are deliberately limited. I want a group that thinks seriously, not a bus tour.
Details are here.
Texas overtook New York. Texas is recruiting in London. Texas is building its own stock exchange. The people who understand early where capital is moving are the ones who benefit from it.
Carpe Diem.
