What goes unspoken is how tiny the overall effect of this will be.
Yes, it will bring some concentrated pain to investors, CEOs, and employees of lots of companies. But how many people will be genuinely, life-alteringly affected by this? 1000? Maybe a few thousand? 1-2% of SF's population? By way of comparison Google has what, 50,000 employees?
I keep having to remind myself that the big companies are the elephants in the room compensation-, real estate- and traffic-wise. They employ hundreds of thousands of people and pay billions of dollars annually in wages. As much as I'd like an affordable place to live, none of this will move the needle that much for the average Bay Area resident.
Google has ~60,000 employees worldwide. From various online sources, they have +/- a few thousand who live in San Francisco. Twitter and Yelp and Square and Dropbox and AirBnB and the other unicorns each employ somewhere in the mid hundreds to low thousands (e.g. 500-2,000) -- again, worldwide. The local numbers are lower.
I don't know reliable this [1] is, but it suggests that there are ~50,000 tech employees total in SF, and the top 50 companies employ about 30,000 of those. So the big players have a lot of people, but it's not as dramatically skewed as you're thinking -- maybe 40% of tech employees work at smaller companies. That passes the smell test for me.
Even assuming that the big players wouldn't lay anyone off (they would; they always do) That's more than enough to make an economic dent in a downturn.
But even if a full 50% of the people working at small tech companies moved out of the city (10k by your count), how would that have any effect whatsoever on the economy? It would bring the population back to where it was about a year ago and employees of smaller companies aren't even among the highest paid.
There are hints of systemic risk. Look at what's happening in Financial Services. Many firms (example: Deutsche Bank) are trading below their bottom in the financial crisis. A banking crash will have a big impact on real estate.
Yahoo had around ~11,700, they did follow through the cuts of %10 last week. That is 1100 right out the gate. Yahoo is huge as far as local employee count. Google probably wont bother doing cuts. Facebook wont bother. Apple maybe a few low level poeple. HP will cut to the bone [1]. There are 800k people stuffed in sf. For the cuts in SF (not all SV) to matter, I would estimate 20% job cuts would be required. That is 160k jobs. We wont get to 160k job loses. Not even close.
Yes, it will bring some concentrated pain to investors, CEOs, and employees of lots of companies. But how many people will be genuinely, life-alteringly affected by this? 1000? Maybe a few thousand? 1-2% of SF's population? By way of comparison Google has what, 50,000 employees?
I keep having to remind myself that the big companies are the elephants in the room compensation-, real estate- and traffic-wise. They employ hundreds of thousands of people and pay billions of dollars annually in wages. As much as I'd like an affordable place to live, none of this will move the needle that much for the average Bay Area resident.