By Brody Ford | Bloomberg
Three years after Oracle Corp. moved its headquarters to Texas from California, Chairman Larry Ellison said he’s planning another move — this time to Nashville.
Documents show that when Oracle moved its headquarters, many employees didn’t follow. Oracle still has more office workers in California, where the company was founded and based for decades, than in Texas.
About 6,900 workers are assigned to California offices, nearly triple the 2,500 employees assigned to those in Texas, according to internal documents seen by Bloomberg.
And Oracle’s largest chunk of US employees aren’t assigned to any office at all. Roughly 37,000 US staffers are classified as remote workers. That includes Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz, who is listed as a “home worker” in Florida. Ellison, a co-founder and the company’s chief technology officer, is known to spend significant time in Hawaii, where he owns the island of Lanai. It couldn’t be determined which states the other remote workers live in.
The employee data highlights how a “headquarters” designation can be amorphous for global companies like Oracle. An Oracle spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The Silicon Valley stalwart’s decision in December 2020 to pick a campus in Austin for its new corporate headquarters was widely cited as an example that California’s economic importance was waning. Relocation of other California companies to Texas, including Charles Schwab Corp. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., seemed to drive the point home.
But the software giant never actually left. California offices in Redwood City, Santa Clara, and Pleasanton remain among the company’s largest, and are particular hubs for the technical talent famously clustered in the region. Even San Francisco’s baseball stadium, called Oracle Park, will retain the company’s name through at least 2038.
More employees even report to offices in Missouri than Texas. This is due to the 2022 acquisition of electronic health records company Cerner, which had its headquarters in Kansas City. Other major employee hubs are located in the Seattle, Boston and Denver areas, according to the documents.
More than half of Oracle’s 158,400 employees as of September worked outside the Americas, the company has said.
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Ellison’s proclamation last week that Nashville would ultimately become its world headquarters set off anxieties among Austin’s civic boosters. “City Hall was as surprised as everyone else,” Austin Mayor Kirk Watson said at the time. Stacy Schmitt of Opportunity Austin, a regional economic organization, said “we are not sure yet what Oracle’s plans to move its HQ to Nashville means for its presence in Austin.”
Nashville is an appealing site for Oracle because of its central role in the health care industry and high quality of life, Ellison said last week. In 2021, Oracle received $175 million in incentives from the city of Nashville and $65 million from the state to help construct a campus in the city where it’s pledging to create 8,500 jobs.
Oracle hasn’t publicly stated what changes a move to Nashville would mean for its presence in Austin. But if its last headquarters move is an example, it may be much less than the fanfare suggests.
–With assistance from Shelly Hagan and Amanda Albright.
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