'Go woke, go broke': Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya suggests that Northeast ci...

With a single tweet, Chamath Palihapitiya, the CEO of Social Capital, has become Twitter’s provocative main character of the day.

Palihapitiya sent out a screenshot of a recent Bloomberg article based on how six southern states had contributed more to U.S. gross domestic product than the northeast corridor of Washington-New York-Boston for the first time in history.

Don't miss

• Rich young Americans have lost confidence in the stock market — and are betting on these 3 assets instead. Get in now for strong long-term tailwinds

• Jeff Bezos and Oprah Winfrey invest in this asset to keep their wealth safe — you may want to do the same in 2023

• Here's how much money the average middle-class American household makes — how do you stack up?

But it was his accompanying caption that sparked hot debate: “Go woke, go broke,” he said, implying that the ongoing culture war and economic policies of northeastern states had facilitated the migration of wealth and economic power to the South.

While tweeps continue to weigh in — including fellow billionaire Mark Cuban — here’s what the numbers show is really going on.

Wealth migration taking place

Bloomberg’s analysis of data from the IRS highlights the southern wealth migration. Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee collectively added $100 billion in new net income from 2020 to 2021.

Meanwhile, the Washington, New York and Boston corridor lost $60 billion in income during this period.

That marks the first time the tax agency has seen this type of reversal since it started collecting this data in the 1990s.

Bloomberg attributes the shift to a “flood of transplants.” Out of the 15 fastest-growing cities, 10 of them are in the Southeast corridor, according to Census Bureau data. Some of that growth is likely attributable to a number of corporations moving their headquarters from the Northeast to the South, bringing with them a tremendous number of jobs.

And it doesn’t hurt that residents will experience “warmer weather, lower taxes, looser regulation and cheaper housing” in the South, as Bloomberg points out.