In the high-stakes game of chicken between CEOs and states, who blinks first?

In 1964, when Martin Luther King Jr. had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Coca-Cola took a stand that it’s still remembered for in its hometown of Atlanta.

A dinner was planned to honor the civil rights leader in January 1965, but many in the city’s white business elite were initially reluctant to attend. After the New York Times reported on the sparse RSVPs, Coca-Cola’s then president and CEO, Paul Austin, gathered the city’s business leaders for a private meeting at the exclusive Piedmont Driving Club and flexed the corporation’s considerable heft—with a threat.

“It’s embarrassing for Coca-Cola to be located in a city that refuses to honor its Nobel Prize winner,” Austin reportedly told the group. “We are an international business. The Coca-Cola Company does not need Atlanta. You all need to decide whether Atlanta needs the Coca-Cola Company.”

Within days, tickets for the dinner had sold out.

Coca-Cola’s intervention revealed the hard power beneath the rhetoric of corporate citizenship: A company with deep roots in a city can use the prospect of its displeasure—or its departure—to force a reckoning. Beyond campaign donations or lobbying muscle, companies can wield the power they hold over jobs, local investment, and the economic ecosystem attached to their presence.

In the past, that influence has largely operated quietly, and such threats—like Coca-Cola’s—were mostly made behind closed doors. But lately, amid a run of clashes over taxes, regulation, social policy, and corporate deals, executives are increasingly making the ultimatum explicit and public: Accommodate us, or risk losing us.

In California, Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison settled a state-led antitrust lawsuit last week challenging the company’s roughly $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, after signaling that the entertainment giant could abandon Hollywood and sell its famed back lot if the legal fight kept the deal from closing.

In New York, Ken Griffin recently warned that Citadel could favor Miami for future growth and rethink a major Manhattan development after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani explicitly called out Griffin’s penthouse while promoting a “pied-à-terre” tax on expensive second homes.

Some billionaire chief executives have gone further and carried out their threats. Elon Musk cited a California law barring school districts from requiring staff to notify parents of a student’s gender identity in his announcement that SpaceX and X would move their headquarters to Texas in 2024. Chevron announced plans to relocate its headquarters to Houston that same year, after a protracted fight with California over energy policy. Oracle, led by David Ellison’s father, Larry, had already joined the California-to-Texas migration in 2020, moving its headquarters from Redwood City to Austin amid a pandemic-era reassessment of remote work, operating costs, and taxes. And Disney scrapped a planned Florida campus in 2023 that would have brought roughly $1 billion in investment and 2,000 jobs to the state, as its feud with Gov. Ron DeSantis escalated.

Many of the recent campaigns by corporations have centered on left-leaning administrations, but the modern template was established by companies seeking to protect LGBTQ rights. In 2015, Angie’s List halted a $40 million Indianapolis headquarters........

© Fortune