Elon Musk is moving. He’s not taking Tesla (TSLA) headquarters with him, but the newly minted second-richest man in the world, has moved out of California and is calling Texas home these days.

He’s not the first to leave, but he’s certainly the wealthiest and most high-profile to depart California. Musk’s move follows, Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) announcement last week that it is moving its headquarters from Silicon Valley to the Houston area. Newly public Palantir (PLTR) also announced earlier in the fall that it would leave the Valley and move its headquarters to Colorado.

“For every one of those examples, which are unfortunate, certainly not something that I want to see, but for every one of those examples, there are many more companies that are telling us they have no intention of going anywhere, that they are California companies, that their people want to continue to live here,“ California Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis said in an interview with Yahoo Finance’s A Time for Change.

CEOs moving their companies out of California is nothing new. In 2019, Charles Schwab (SCHW) announced it would shift its headquarters from San Francisco to the Dallas area, as part of its TD Ameritrade acquisition. In 2018, a study by Spectrum Location Services, estimated that 1,800 relocation or "disinvestment events" occurred in 2016, the most recent year available. About 13,000 companies left the state from 2008 to 2016.

The Pacific Research Institute has ranked California No. 50, last place, on the level of burdens from state regulatory structures. Musk, who recently compared the state to a winning sports franchise that gets “a little complacent, a little entitled,” has also complained about government regulations in the past and this week at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council he called for the government to “just get out of the way” of innovators.

Kounalakis recognizes the challenges companies face operating in California, including the high cost of housing and insists the state is trying to address it. She makes the case that there is more benefit than burden to operating in the nation’s most populous state.

“There are other things that make us highly desirable,” she said, citing the state’s higher education system which has 3 million students enrolled in public higher education, as a draw and a supply of a future workforce.

That said, California isn’t backing down on new regulations like a measure that will require publicly held corporations in California to achieve gender and racial diversity benchmarks on their boards of directors by January 2023. That measure should be seen as improving the business climate for all and not chilling innovation, according to Kounalakis.

“We always want to do everything possible, at least I do, to make sure that we are hospitable to job creators and innovators and entrepreneurs and other businesses that want to locate here, but we believe as well, that part of the reason that companies do come is because of the kinds of values that we have in our state, our open society, our environmental protections, and a variety of other things that make us very appealing to a lot of businesses,” she said.

Jen Rogers is an anchor for Yahoo Finance Live. Follow her on Twitter @JenSaidIt.

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