9. Austin, Texas: more than $142,000
• How much money it takes to be in the top 1% in Texas: $424,507
• Median income in Austin: $71,000
• Metro-area population: 2.1 million
Austin is one of the leading cities in high tech innovation. Each year the engineering and computer science schools of the University of Texas at Austin mint thousands of new graduates, feeding a steady stream of new employees to power the Texas city’s vast technology and defense contractor industries. High tech companies that operate in Austin include: 3M, Apple, Amazon, AMD, Apartment Ratings, Applied Materials, ARM Holdings, Bigcommerce, BioWare, Blizzard Entertainment, Buffalo Technology, Cirrus Logic, Cisco Systems, Dropbox, eBay, PayPal, Electronic Arts, Flextronics, Facebook, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Hoover’s, HomeAway, Hostgator, Intel Corporation, National Instruments, Nvidia, Oracle, Polycom, Qualcomm, Inc., Rackspace, RetailMeNot, Rooster Teeth, Samsung Group, Silicon Laboratories, Spansion, United Devices, Xerox, and Facebook. Like other major Texas metros, Austin also boasts a thriving biotech industry and many pharmaceutical companies- 85 in all.