California built a trillion-dollar economy on exploited labor, and that same machine is now driving a historic exodus of residents.

• The Gold Rush economy was jumpstarted by enslaving Native Americans and paying bounties for killing them, wiping out most of the native population to clear land for mining.
• Each new wave of cheap labor — Mexican miners, Chinese immigrants, and today's undocumented farmworkers — got taxed, exploited, then discarded once politically inconvenient.
• Railroad barons later ran a real estate hype machine selling fake "paper towns," a playbook Silicon Valley echoes today with Wild-West startup mythology funded by Wall Street cash.
• Big Tech now dominates the state's economy but concentrates nearly all new investment in a handful of giant AI firms, while relying on poorly paid overseas workers to train its models.
• Soaring rent and home prices, driven largely by the tech boom, have pushed over a million people to leave California since 2020, and population projections keep getting revised downward.

Outlook: Unless housing costs ease, California's population decline and reliance on an exhausted labor force are likely to deepen, even as tech wealth keeps concentrating at the top.