McKessan delivered medicine to every corner of America.

It ranked as the sixth largest company in the entire country.

Then in 2018, they announced they were leaving California.

The move saved them $400 million every single year.

But the real story is not about money.

It is about what California has become and why even the biggest companies cannot survive there anymore.

Let me take you back to 1833.

California was not even a state yet.

In New York City, two men named John McKessan and Charles Olcott started a small business.

They imported medicines and herbal products from Europe.

They stocked the medicine chests on trade ships with drugs and spices from Pennsylvania Shaker colonies.

It was simple work, but it mattered.

People needed medicine, and these two men figured out how to get it to them.

The company grew slowly at first.

When Charles Olcott died in 1853, a new partner named Daniel Robbins joined.

The company became McKessan and Robbins.

By the 1850s, they were delivering medicine by covered wagon to 17 states.

From Vermont to California, McKessan was there.

They became one of the first wholesale companies to actually make their own drugs.

Their pills and tablets won medals around the world for quality.

By 1900, McKesen was the largest drug distributor in all of America.

Think about that for a moment.

This company has been keeping Americans healthy for almost 200 years.

It distributed lozenes during the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 50 million people worldwide.

When penicellin became available in the 1940s, McKesen helped get it to patients across the country.

This company was always there when America needed it most.

In 1967, the company merged with Foremost Dairies and moved its headquarters to San Francisco.

The Golden Gate City became home for the next five decades.

McKessan set up shop at One Post Street in the financial district, a beautiful 38story tower right next to the Montgomery Street BART station.

For 50 years, McKesen grew from that California base.

They became the biggest pharmaceutical distributor in North America.

One out of every three prescription drugs in America passes through McKesen’s hands.

They serve half of all hospitals in the country.

They employ over 80,000 people worldwide.

By 2018, the company had nearly $200 billion in annual revenue.

That made them the sixth largest company in the entire United States, bigger than Apple at the time and bigger than Amazon.

Only Walmart, Exxon, Berkshire Hathaway, United Health, and CVS ranked higher.

This was a California giant built over generations.

A true American success story with roots going back before the California Gold Rush.

Then everything changed.

In November 2018, Mccason dropped a bombshell.

They announced they were moving their global headquarters to Texas.

Not just a branch office, not just a regional hub, the entire global headquarters of America’s sixth largest company was leaving California forever.

CEO John Hamburgg did not hide the reasons.

He said the move would improve efficiency, collaboration, and cost competitiveness.

That last word is the key.

Cost competitiveness.

California had become too expensive to do business and the warning signs had been there for years.

The company had already sold its iconic San Francisco headquarters building at one post street.

They got $245 million for that 38story tower in 2017.

The buyer was Brookfield Properties.

The building that once housed a Fortune 6 company now has co-working spaces for startups.

That tells you everything about what happened to San Francisco.

The big players left and the gig economy moved in.

McKissen had already seen the writing on the wall years earlier.

In 2017, they quietly opened a brand new campus in Irving, Texas.

Irving sits in the Dallas Fort Worth area and calls itself the headquarters of headquarters for good reason.

Exon Mobile is there.

Major corporations keep choosing Irving over coastal cities like San Francisco.

The business climate is just better.

McKessan spent $157 million building that Texas campus from scratch.

By 2018, that Texas campus already had 1,600 employees doing vital work.

They handled IT, finance, accounting, marketing, sales, and operations.

The real work was already happening in Texas.

The headquarters move was just making official what everyone already knew.

Tyler was a 22-year veteran of McKesen.

He had a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago.

This was a brilliant man who understood numbers better than almost anyone.

And he already lived in Texas.

The man chosen to run one of America’s biggest companies had already figured out he did not want to live in California.

He was not going to commute from San Francisco to run the company.

That should have been a wake-up call for California politicians.

When your top executives refuse to live in your state, you have a serious problem.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott welcomed McKesen with open arms.

He released a statement calling it an example of the highquality companies and jobs Texas has attracted.

He credited the state’s focus on economic growth for the win.

Irving Mayor Rick Stoper was thrilled.

He celebrated having yet another Fortune 500 company choose his city as their global home.

Texas rolled out the red carpet.

Meanwhile, California said almost nothing.

No offers to reduce the tax burden.

No promises to cut regulations, just silence as another corporate giant walked out the door.

The numbers behind this move tell the brutal truth.

McKessan expected to save $300 to $400 million per year by restructuring and consolidating in Texas.

That is not pocket change.

That is $400 million every single year that California’s taxes, regulations, and costs were draining from the company over 10 years.

That adds up to $4 billion.

Texas has no state income tax.

California’s top rate is 13.

3%, the highest in America.

Texas has a predictable businessfriendly regulatory environment.

And California has endless rules, restrictions, and compliance requirements that change constantly.

Texas welcomed McKessan with real incentives.

The Texas Enterprise Fund gave them $9.

75 million when they opened the Irving campus.

The city of Irving added another $2 million on top of that.

California gave them paperwork and problems.

Texas gave them cash and a welcome mat.

The choice was obvious.

The move became official on April 1st, 2019.

Brian Tyler became CEO the same day.

He issued a statement saying the Lascalina campus offered everything they could ask for.

Modern workspaces where employees can connect and collaborate.

A city with great energy and growth.

a community that actually wanted them there and showed it.

Three years later, Tyler spoke publicly about the decision at the Lake Nona Impact Forum.

He admitted it was a hard choice.

Standing on stage in front of 400 employees who had to think about the impact on their families was emotional.

That was a tough moment for everyone involved.

But he had no regrets.

He said Irving was absolutely the right community for McKessan to call home.

The move worked exactly as planned.

California kept about 1,400 McKesen employees after the move.

They even opened a new distribution center in Roseville, California.

McKesen Ventures stayed behind in San Francisco with a small technology development team.

But the power left, the decision makers left, the headquarters left, the prestige and the status left.

San Francisco went from being home to a Fortune 6 company to being an afterthought, a branch office instead of the center of the action.

McKessan was far from alone in making this choice.

Becttel, the giant construction company, left.

Jamba Juice, the smoothie chain, left.

The Northace, the outdoor clothing brand, left.

Coremark Holding Company, packed up and moved to Texas.

California was bleeding corporate headquarters at an alarming rate.

The Hoover Institution at Stanford University tracked the exodus closely.

They found that 352 company headquarters left California between 2018 and 2021 alone.

That includes 11 Fortune 1000 companies.

The flood only accelerated after McKessan showed other companies the way out.

Tesla left California for Texas.

Oracle left California for Texas.

Hulet Packard Enterprise left California for Texas.

Charles Schwab left California for Texas.

After 145 years in the state, even Chevron left California for Texas.

SpaceX left California for Texas.

And the pattern is impossible to ignore or explain away.

Today, Dallas Fort Worth has 21 companies on the Fortune 500 list.

McKessan is now the highest ranked company in all of North Texas.

They sit at number nine on the national fortune 500.

Their revenue has grown to over $38 billion annually.

They are the largest healthcare company in the entire United States.

And they achieved all of that growth after leaving California.

The irony could not be more obvious.

Texas keeps winning these corporate relocations.

California keeps losing them.

The Tax Foundation ranked California 48th out of 50 states for business tax climate.

Only New Jersey and New York scored worse.

Housing costs in California run 110% higher than the national average.

Employees cannot afford to live anywhere near their offices.

Companies cannot recruit talent because nobody wants to move there.

More than half of them chose Texas as their new home.

In 2021 alone, 64 businesses fled California.

That was the highest number in a single year on record.

McKessan saw all of this coming back in 2018.

They made the smart move before the stampede started.

Brian Tyler studied economics at the University of Chicago.

He understood what the numbers were telling him.

California’s numbers simply did not add up anymore.

The math was broken and getting worse every year.

The company that started delivering medicine by covered wagon in 1833 now operates from Irving, Texas.

They have been in business for over 190 years.

They survived everything America threw at them.

They distributed COVID 19 vaccines for the federal government during the pandemic.

Over 370 million doses delivered to Americans who needed them.

The politicians did not care, so they left and they are thriving like never before.

Today, if you need prescription medicine, there is a one in three chance McKesen delivered it to your pharmacy.

They serve over 50,000 pharmacy locations across the country.

They support 75% of American hospitals in some capacity.

They employed tens of thousands of workers in good paying jobs, just not in California anymore.

The Golden State pushed away a company that helped build American healthcare, a company older than California itself, a company that had been loyal to San Francisco for 50 years.

None of that history mattered.

California’s politicians kept raising taxes.

They kept adding regulations.

They kept making it harder and more expensive to do business.

They never stopped to ask if companies might