Ken Griffin moved Citadel, his $67 billion hedge fund, from Chicago to Miami in 2022 -- then paid $363 million for a Brickell waterfront site to build a 54-story headquarters tower. He's said plainly he thinks Miami can overtake New York as the world's financial capital.

For 56 years, Disney World ran its own local government inside Florida -- its own zoning, building codes, fire department, roads, and utilities, largely exempt from the rules that applied everywhere else in the state. Florida took that authority back in 2023, the direct result of a political fight over the state's "Don't Say Gay" law.

The Federal Reserve has held its most closely watched annual meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming every August since 1981. Four hundred miles away in Cheyenne, real Wyoming-chartered banks have spent years failing to get the most basic thing a bank needs from the Fed: an account.

RightNow Technologies, founded in Bozeman, Montana in 1997, sold to Oracle in 2011 for roughly $1.5 billion. That exit wasn't a one-off -- it opened a real, still-growing tech economy that now pays Montana workers 2.4 times the state's average wage.

The Mississippi River carries 92% of US agricultural exports, and most of it funnels out through New Orleans and South Louisiana -- roughly 60% of the nation's grain exports and nearly two-thirds of its soybean exports. New Orleans isn't just a city with a big port; it's the literal chokepoint the country's farm-export economy has to pass through.

Houston is known for oil, but the Texas Medical Center on its doorstep is the largest medical complex in the world -- 54 institutions, 106,000 employees, one 2.1-square-mile campus. The city's real economy has always run on more than energy; the oil just gets the headline.

Techstars, the accelerator that put Boulder on the startup map, moved its headquarters to New York and shut down its Boulder programs in 2024. Boulder raised $1.7 billion in venture capital that same year anyway -- the ecosystem Techstars built didn't leave when the company did.

Colorado School of Mines was chartered in 1874 to train engineers for a gold rush that was already fading. Its mining program is still ranked #1 in the world, but what actually anchors Denver's aerospace cluster today is who its graduates build for now.

A large enough anchor employer pulls a second economy into its orbit. Bentonville tracked it year over year: 48 companies kept a Walmart-supplier office there in 1994, 445 by 2001, and more than 1,500 today.

Friedman's 1970 case for shareholder profit-maximization came with a condition everyone quotes half of: profit-seeking only serves the public inside real, open competition. Three quiet rule changes -- executive pay, stock buybacks, and antitrust tolerance for concentration -- removed that condition, and United's 70% control of Dulles is what's left standing.

Two-thirds of the Fortune 500 are legally incorporated in Delaware without being headquartered there -- a legal address worth nearly a third of the state's entire budget in franchise taxes. What actually built Delaware's physical economy was DuPont, an 1802 gunpowder mill that once employed 10% of the state's population.

Women-founded companies generate 78 cents of revenue per dollar invested, against 31 cents for male-founded companies -- yet receive just 1-2% of US VC funding. Black-founded startups fare worse still, at 0.48% in 2024 and falling.