• Texas has become one of the top destinations for movers in the US.
• Its business-friendly climate and lower cost of living attract people from all walks of life.
• Supermodel Bella Hadid and actor James Marsden are among the celebrities who have moved to Texas.

Texas is popular for many reasons.

The second-largest US state is the birthplace of the iconic musician Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter as well as NFL star Michael Strahan and actresses Selena Gomez and Reneé Zellweger.

It's also home to a beloved football team, the Dallas Cowboys, and internationally famous festivals including South by Southwest (SXSW).

Beyond its cultural significance, Texas has a reputation for its affordability, largely due to its relatively lower cost of living and absence of state income tax. This personal finance appeal, combined with a business-friendly environment, has attracted entrepreneurs and their companies over the years.

Word has gotten out — and cities in the Lone Star State often lead lists of top places Americans are moving to.

According to a Business Insider analysis of individual-level data from the Census Bureau's 2022 American Community Survey, over 668,300 people moved to Texas between 2021 and 2022, the most recent time period for which data is available. This makes Texas the second-most popular destination in the US for movers, just behind Florida, which had about 739,000 inbound movers during the same period.

Several celebrities are among the hordes of movers to Texas. This reflects a broader trend of wealth realignment in the United States, where even the proverbial Joneses are moving to areas where their money goes further and the weather is more favorable.

Consider supermodel Bella Hadid, who moved to Fort Worth, Texas, this year to live with her professional horseman boyfriend, Adan Banuelos. Roseanne Barr and comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan have decamped from LA to Austin in recent years.

Many other stars have also relocated to Texas.

Business Insider has compiled a list of 16 notable celebrities and businesspeople who have moved themselves — and in some cases, their businesses — to the Lone Star State.

The list is presented in alphabetical order by last name.

Roseanne Barr traded the Hollywood Hills for 30 acres in Texas Hill Country.

Roseanne Barr's son, Jake Pentland, told Us Weekly in June 2025 that his famous mother had traded the Hollywood Hills for Texas Hill Country, a region in central Texas that includes cities like Austin and New Braunfels.

"My mom lives with me, my wife, and my two daughters — she's the best grandma," Pentland told the magazine.

In a separate June interview with Fox News Digital, Barr said living in Texas is a "dream come true" and described what her new life looks like.

"I'm doing a lot of mowing. I've got a really fantastic tractor out here, and I'm mowing," Barr said. "The only problem is I don't clear the trees quite as good as I should, and I'm always hitting a tree and knocking it over, and it always hits me in the head."

Haylie Duff admitted it took a while to realize she could still have an acting career without living in LA.

A native of Texas, Duff decided with her fiancé Matt Rosenberg to pack up the kids and leave California once the pandemic hit.

At first, she was nervous that the move would hurt her career.

"I think so much of my fear of moving out of Los Angeles was that my career was there and that I would never work again or something like that," she told Fox News Digital in 2022. "And, you know, I think this has all taught us that Zoom certainly can be a very powerful tool. And we can, you know, very luckily for me, get to continue to work from here, and I get to live near my dad. I haven't lived, here, near my dad in a really long time."

Scott Eastwood loves living in Texas because it "slows life down."

The son of Clint Eastwood, Scott has been methodically building his own career, showing up in the "Fast and Furious" franchise and Guy Ritchie movies.

During his downtime in Texas, he does everything from fishing to hunting.

"I think that's why people who come to Texas really can fall in love with it," he told Flaunt in 2021 from his home in Austin. "There's more community, people are more neighborly, people are nice. It slows life down a little bit. It's not this fast-paced living in a big city like New York or Los Angeles."

Adrian Grenier's acting career is thriving in Texas.

In 2020, "Entourage" and "The Devil Wears Prada" star Adrian Grenier left the Hollywood Hills for a 46-acre sustainable ranch in Bastrop, Texas, a city about a 40-minute drive southeast of Austin.

While in Texas, Grenier has continued acting and most recently appeared in the short film "Self Custody," about a struggling father who loses a cryptocurrency fortune. The film was shot in Austin, near his home.

In an interview with Page Six in March, Grenier said Texas' burgeoning film and television industry will keep him in the state.

"There's $2.5 billion that the Texas state government just put into film and television projects in Texas," Grenier said. "They're building three movie studios not too far from me. I don't see any reason why we wouldn't just continue to film in Texas."

Bella Hadid said she moved to Texas for her health.

After spending most of her life jet-setting around the world trying to conquer the modeling industry, Hadid decided recently to take some time away from the spotlight.

In early 2024, she spoke to Allure about moving to Texas to focus on her mental and physical health (she was diagnosed with Lyme Disease in 2013), and be with her cowboy boyfriend Adan Banuelos.

"Just as I have styled myself for years now — which I still do — I love being able to do my own hair and makeup, be happy with how I look, and get ready with my girlfriends here in Texas," Hadid told Allure. "We have the best time, and I never feel like I need to do too much."

"For the first time now, I'm not putting on a fake face. If I don't feel good, I won't go. If I don't feel good, I take time for myself. And I've never had the opportunity to do that or say that before," Hadid added. "Now when anybody sees me in pictures and they say I look happy, I genuinely am. I am feeling better; my bad days now were my old good days."

Woody Harrelson is lobbying to make Texas a production hub for film and television.

Harrelson lived in Hawaii for many years before moving back to his home state of Texas in 2023.

Now in the Lone Star State and living just outside Austin, the actor has lobbied alongside longtime friend Matthew McConaughey to make Texas a hub for film and television production.

In 2025, the Texas House approved Senate Bill 22, which provides $300 million every two years through 2035 to support the local film industry.

50 Cent is a New Yorker, but his primary residence is in Texas.

In 2021, the rapper-turned-television producer and entrepreneur announced on X that he was living in Houston.

Since James Marsden moved to Texas, he lives closer to his mother.

The star has enjoyed visiting Austin for decades but finally decided to live there in 2020.

"I love it. I've been coming here for 20 years," he told "Live with Kelly and Ryan" in 2020. "I'm much closer to my mom and everybody. I love it. It's great."

Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick traded California for Texas.

The former Uber CEO announced on the daily live video and audio podcast TBPN in March that he had moved to Texas in December 2025.

Kalanick joins a slew of tech billionaires, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who have left California for greener pastures.

Keith Lee fell in love with Dallas' restaurants.

The former mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter turned TikTok food critic has set up shop in Texas.

After living in Las Vegas, Lee relocated to Texas in November 2024. In a December video reviewing the downtown Dallas restaurant The Wicked Butcher, he revealed that he now lives in Dallas.

"One thing I do love about the Dallas food scene — we've been here a month, a month and a half — they do have some nice fine dining restaurants," Lee said.

Matthew McConaughey wanted to be closer to family.

Oscar-winner Matthew McConaughey and wife Camila Alves settled in Austin in 2012 after buying a 10,800-square-foot mansion.

According to a 2024 profile in Southern Living, the move to Texas was initially because of a "family crisis," when he needed to help his mother and two brothers. The couple decided to stay put and raise their three children there.

"Ritual came back," McConaughey said of being back in Texas. "Whether that was Sunday church, sports, dinner together as a family every night, or staying up after that telling stories in the kitchen, sitting at the island pouring drinks and nibbling while retelling them all in different ways than we told them before."

Elon Musk moved to Texas and brought his companies with him.

In July, Elon Musk vowed to move two of his companies, X and SpaceX, out of California and into Texas. He already moved Telsa to Texas in 2021.

In 2020, Musk announced that he had already moved to Texas himself at The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council summit.

Musk has claimed to own a tiny home in Texas, and records show he bought a house in Austin in 2022.

Shaquille O'Neal has been buying up properties in North Texas.

In 2022, O'Neal bought a 5,269-square-foot home in Carrollton listed at $1,224,000 and sold it in 2024 for an undisclosed amount, though it was listed for $1.7 million, according to Realtor.com.

That year, Chexy Trust, tied to the Carrollton purchase, bought a 4,670-square-foot home in Rockwall County. In 2024, O'Neal opened a branch of his Big Chicken chain restaurant in Fort Worth.

As his footprint in the region grows, he told WFAA he plans to make the area his home base.

"I'm 75% going to move here full time," O'Neal said in June. "I have to see what's going on with TNT next year, but based on that, you'll probably be seeing a lot more of me."

Glen Powell got tired of the lack of freedom living in Los Angeles.

The "Twisters" star, who is also a native Texan, moved back to Austin from Los Angeles recently to be close to his family and for his own mental health.

"When all you do is consume movies and entertainment, you could become a little self-aware and maybe derivative of yourself," Powell told USA Today. "Your personal life, there's no sort of freedom there, there's storytelling around that, and I feel like that's just not good for you on the long term."

Jared Padalecki has a soft spot for Austin.

Padalecki ditched Hollywood for Texas before it was a trend. The "Supernatural" star, a San Antonio native, relocated from Los Angeles to Austin with his wife, Genevieve, in 2012.

In an Instagram video taken on Austin's 24th Street in 2020, he explained why he loves the city so much.

"Austin brings me a warmth and a happiness and a peace that I have been unable to find anywhere else in my travels," Padalecki said. "I love being here."

Christine Quinn's return to her home state has brought her closer to her family.

In 2025, former "Selling Sunset" star Christine Quinn relocated to her home state of Texas after splitting from her ex-husband, tech entrepreneur Christian Dumontet.

Quinn now lives in a suburb outside Dallas with her young son, Christian.

"I am really, really grateful to be living here," Quinn told People in January, adding that she's happy to be closer to family. "I have a sister who lives really close to me, and my son has a cousin. So it's really something that I needed as opposed to the chaos when I was in Los Angeles."

Joe Rogan ended up in Texas once the pandemic hit.

Like many other celebs, Rogan left Los Angeles once the pandemic hit.

In a 2023 episode of his popular podcast, "The Joe Rogan Experience," he explained why he ended up in Texas.

"Then we went to the lake, and people are playing music and jumping in the water," said Rogan, adding that his kids "were like, 'We want to live here!'"

"That was it. Two months later, I lived here," he said in the podcast episode.

Jamie Lynn Sigler has felt more connected to her craft since moving to Texas.

"The Sopranos" star moved to Austin in 2021 with her family, husband Cutter Dykstra, and sons Beau and Jack.

"I almost feel more connected to my craft and why I love acting," Sigler told The New York Times in 2021. "When the calls come in, it's a beautiful surprise. I'm still on things and I'm still a businesswoman and it's still my career, but I don't feel the pressure around it because we took a stand for ourselves and we made decisions for our families."

Scott Galloway never claimed to be an activist.

"I'm too lazy, selfish, socially minded," he told Business Insider on a February call about his unlikely leadership of two movements at once, both with Big Tech in the crosshairs. "I saw an opportunity for a new form of economic activism," he said, "but I'm a long way from being a Cesar Chavez or refusing to give up my bus seat."

Later in our call, he analogizes his "Resist and Unsubscribe" initiative — which urges Americans to unsubscribe from Big Tech to protest the Trump Administration's immigration crackdown — to the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycotts. At one point, he calls activists "more noble" than himself. Seconds later, he describes not wanting to "get on a call with a bunch of people in Birkenstocks."

I asked his cohost, Kara Swisher, the same question: Is Scott an activist? Not in a traditional sense, she texted me, or he would have formed a coalition. "I got a lot of pings from people who do organizing that this was a dumb way to do it," Swisher wrote. "It wasn't."

If you don't know Galloway's name, you've certainly seen his clips. The executive-turned-professor-turned-podcaster rakes in millions from his center-left media empire, including four podcasts, two newsletters, and six books, the latest about how young men are socially and economically disadvantaged, thanks in part to Big Tech. He's a sort of shock jock for the TikTok age — and his 400,000 followers there love it.

In recent months, his anti-Big Tech efforts have made him an even bigger lightning rod. He's been disinvited from two speaking gigs, he said, because the hosts didn't "want controversy." (He declined to share which gigs: "I'm hoping they invite me next year.") He's also heard from CEOs or chief marketing officers of 20% of the companies he's targeted, he said, who have mostly been kind. He says he's disappointed because he wishes they felt more threatened.

It's a surprising turn for the serial entrepreneur and business school professor. He's a provocateur, a testosterone-injecting multimillionaire who students call a "dick." Is this the man who can move the masses to quit Amazon Prime cold turkey?

Galloway is a businessman at heart. Even his activism is done through the market.

After federal agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Galloway launched his Resist and Unsubscribe campaign. The best way to catch President Donald Trump's attention, he reasoned, was the market. Since, he said, corporations were providing the "data, infrastructure, and logistics" to assist with Trump's immigration crackdown, it was time for Americans to vote with their dollars.

He wanted to walk the walk — and that meant cutting his own subscriptions. He quickly found that he'd been paying for some duplicates: four Apple TV Plus accounts, three ChatGPT subscriptions. He had four AT&T contracts, of which "three are for Blackberrys and iPads that have been in landfills for the last decade," he told me.

The Galloway family also found some workarounds. His son found a "probably illegal" way to watch the Premier League without Paramount+. He binge-watched "Heated Rivalry" before dumping HBO Max. The hardest app to give up was Uber, which he said on his podcast was costing him $34,000 a year.

On stock ownership, Galloway is more mixed. He's hesitant to sell his Amazon shares while the stock is down, but he said he did sell down almost all of his Apple shares.

"I'm especially offended, personally, by Tim Cook," he said. Galloway said that Cook paints himself as a "soft, gentle, nice guy" while sucking up to Trump at the "Melania" premiere. ("I'm not a political person on either side," Cook recently told Good Morning America.)

He plans to move his money out of Goldman Sachs and is debating whether to choose a regional US bank or the Royal Bank of Canada.

If you're worried that you can't fully unsubscribe, he gets it.

"I don't have entire moral clarity around this," Galloway said. "I still have an iPhone, and I'm not giving it up."

As February came to a close, Galloway felt contented. Resist and Unsubscribe had hit 23 million views on social media and 2 million unique site visits, he said. An estimate on his website shows how much market capitalization the movement would wipe out if 5% of visitors canceled two subscriptions. As of this story's publication date, it calculated just over $281 million in losses.

When Galloway first started talking about the plight facing America's young men five years ago, it produced a "gag reflex," he said. People compared him to manosphere influencer Andrew Tate and accused him of misogyny.

Galloway has said that young men are more economically and socially disadvantaged than young women. He points to the stats. Young men account for only 42% of students at four-year universities, and 63% of young men are single. "If you go into a morgue and there are five people who died by suicide, four are men," he said.

His book, "Notes on Being a Man," published in November, is a how-to guide for the disenfranchised young man in your life. Of course, young people are reading for pleasure less and less. His most encouraging feedback comes from mothers, Galloway said.

The book has also received plenty of criticism. In her review in The New Yorker, Jessica Winter writes that Galloway thinks "men should still rank above women in the social hierarchy, but just not as much as before."

Galloway seemed taken aback. "I think that's a total misinterpretation of what I've written about," he said. Those on the left — which he groups The New Yorker into — seemed to think that young men don't have problems, he said. "They are the problem."

"We have decided, in the social hierarchy, young men are less deserving of empathy than women," Galloway said.

Galloway also faced misogyny accusations from women online after calling himself a "'50s dad" who wasn't sure if there should be mandatory paternity leave. He said that dads are a "waste of time" in the first few months of a child's life, and that their only jobs are to keep babies from drowning and "make sure moms don't lose it." In The New York Times, Jessica Grose called it "loud and wrong."

On this subject, Galloway was more remorseful. "The comments on paternity leave were meant to be funny," he said. "They weren't. It was stupid, and so far I've paid a fairly significant reputational price."

He was less sympathetic to the Times, which he said "made a cartoon out of my comments so that they could play guardians of gotcha."

Stirring up controversy has long been part of Galloway's brand. Why not double down?

"I try to be provocative, I try to be funny, I try to say what I'm thinking," he told me. "Against paternity leave? No, that's absolutely not the message I want to communicate."

It's easy to think that Galloway hates Big Tech to the bone.

Tech is the target of both of his movements. He accuses the industry of helping to push young men down; in his book, he analogizes Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg to heroin dealers standing outside a middle school. Then, for Resist and Unsubscribe, he asks you to stop paying these companies entirely.

Indeed, on our call, Galloway spared no barbs for the tech CEOs. "I don't think there's any way feasible that he could be described as a good person," he said of Zuckerberg.

But the tech industry is full of his friends, his former coworkers, and the people who made him rich. Galloway is an entrepreneur, after all; he made (some of) his millions on the sale of the business intelligence firm, L2. He wrote a book about Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, which he called a "love letter."

Of the executives targeted by Resist and Unsubscribe, Galloway said that half are acquaintances, a quarter are "friendly" with him, and one or two are friends. "I find that they're, on the whole, good people," he said of tech executives.

That's what makes his shift to organizing so surprising. He's not raging against an industry from the outside; he could well be part of the in-crowd if he wanted to. He was a successful business executive with a vengeful spirit, then a snarky podcaster — and now a man trying to save the world.

Galloway said that humans are "net gainers" from Big Tech — but that we're also net gainers from pesticides and fossil fuels. What's Big Tech's emission? "Rage," he said.

Pesticides and fossil fuels are regulated by the government. For tech, we often rely on a benevolent CEO, Galloway said. He's not sure they exist anymore.

"If we're waiting on the better angels of Mark Zuckerberg to show up, don't hold your breath," he said.