Midland-Odessa has almost 350,000.
And that doesn’t include all the weekly labor living in containers when oil is above $80/bbl.
The real question is how much of this is making things, and how much is funny money, creating wealth from thin air and false promises.
How much of San Jose’s GDP was wrapped up in SVB? (on the Forbes list of best banks last week).
Odessa has its own entry. Quite high, too.
As far as “producing things”, that is a problem with these article’s numbers. It includes spending on welfare, etc.
As far as “producing things”, I can tell you that one time I flew into Midland very late at night (going from Columbus MS to Nevada) and I thought our birds were in fire, but it was the reflected flares from wells making the nice new unpainted plane glow.
Busy bees in west Texas.