THIS IS NOT A DRILL

Across the Lone Star State, America's brashest founders are spending billions in a blitz to displace Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street, and just about every other established power center. Go ahead, bet against them.

- By Tom Foster Photography by Brian Finke

“This is real—everything I’m about to tell you is real,” said Ben Lamm. The billionaire serial founder known for his grand pronouncements and wavy mane of brown hair sat at the edge of a sofa in the posh Austin Proper hotel, located in a downtown high-rise across from Meta's local headquarters in one direction and a soaring Google skyscraper in another. He fired up a presentation on his laptop. The news he was set to announce—that his Dallas-based company, Colossal Bio-sciences, had resurrected a seemingly mythical species known as the dire wolf, extinct for 10,000-plus years—was an entrepreneurial mic drop.

Lamm, whose previous companies made everything from restaurant chatbots to satellite control technology, went on to make the case that his biotech breakthrough could revolutionize conservation by restoring biodiversity. Colossal launched in 2021 with a goal of reintroducing the woolly mammoth to the Arctic tundra, and here he was, less than four years, later announcing something just as mind-blowing.

Colossal’s achievement sparked eye-popping headlines and heated debate around the globe in the days to come. Was this really de-extinction, or just a genetically modified gray wolf? What kinds of unforeseen consequences might Colossal’s creation unleash? Had people even seen Jurassic Park? But one thing about it wasn’t a challenge for anyone to accept: that an idea this brash and provocative had come from Texas.

More than just a bet on a wild scientific concept, Colossal is emblematic of an audacious moment in Texas, where leaders across a wide variety of industries are making a play to create a new center of gravity in American business, essentially displacing the traditional coastal centers of power. That’s in addition to efforts to extend Texas’s dominance in fast-changing industries that the state has historically led, such as energy and space.