On Saturday, SpaceX workers in South Texas opted to establish the new municipality called Starbase and chose their colleagues as the town’s mayor and city commissioners.
The almost unanimous vote turned Elon Musk into not only the wealthiest person in the world and the leader of the DOGE project revolutionizing the federal administration but also the boss of an entity that essentially functions as a SpaceX company town, encompassing the whole government.
“Starbase, Texas,” Musk
posted
On X, “has transformed into an actual city!”
It’s improbable that this will be his final endeavor. The creation of Starbase at the southernmost part of Texas as the latest municipality coincides with the discreet development of a settlement near Austin—a community intricately linked.
to
Musk’s strategies for colonizing Mars.
The town of Snailbrook—which includes over a hundred houses, a supermarket, and a Montessori school named Ad Astra, translating from Latin as “towards the stars”—symbolizes Musk’s strategy to strengthen his economic and political influence in the heart of Texas.
Snailbrook’s development occurs despite recurrent penalties and grievances from Texas municipalities and environmental authorities, who have identified issues with Musk’s enterprises.
repeatedly
dump
industrial waste
into lakes, rivers, and wetlands around his facilities throughout the state.
It’s also part of a grand vision.
“If successful, this model could be scaled and replicated — influencing future tech hubs globally — a vision for expansion,” all-Musk news channel Muskuniverse
reported
in November. “The bigger plan for Bastrop is Snailbrook.”
What is Snailbrook?
Located just 30 minutes east of Austin, Snailbrook is poised to start a significant growth period by the end of this year.
report
by Dallas-based public radio station KERA found in February.
Musk and his collaborators see the town, born out of discussions with his ex-girlfriend Grimes and musician Kanye West, as “a kind of Texan utopia.” This was initially reported by The Wall Street Journal.
reported
in 2023.
Ever since, this new community has been established on unincorporated territory within Bastrop County, close to an expanding area featuring various enterprises owned by Musk.
The settlement sits near the headquarters for Musk’s The Boring Company, which digs tunnels; an expanding SpaceX manufacturing facility that makes the company’s Starlink internet kits and
the new headquarters for X
.
It’s also about 15 miles east of Tesla’s Gigafactory and the new headquarters of Neuralink, Musk’s brain-to-computer startup.
In Texas, just 200 residents are needed to incorporate, as Starbase did on Saturday. As soon as a deal to link the new settlement to Bastrop’s wastewater line goes through in the next year, Carrillo-Trevino said, it will grow far larger.
Consider the number of acres Musk owns,” she stated. “It equates to thousands of homes that could be situated there.
Why central Texas?
The area is appealing due to its cultural attributes and relaxed approach to regulations — elements that Musk finds difficult to separate.
He began publicly
exploring an exit
from California in May 2020, when the city of Fremont closed his Tesla factory due to COVID.
Musk
reopened the Fremont factory
in defiance of the local government — he was a vocal opponent of Covid restrictions. As the lockdowns began in March 2020, he allegedly
bet podcaster
Sam Harris offered $1 million stating that the pandemic would result in fewer than 35,000 cases in the U.S. According to data from Johns Hopkins.
stopped collecting data
In 2023, the figure surpassed 100 million, including approximately 1.1 million fatalities.
California had turned into the place of “excessive regulation, too much litigation, heavy taxation, dog waste on the sidewalks, and disdain,” he stated.
told
The conservative satirical site The Babylon Bee in December 2021.
By that time, he had already started looking into relocating to Austin, where figures such as Joe Rogan, Brian Redban, and Tony Hincliffe—who represented new “anti-woke” symbols—were also heading. Additionally, the University of Austin, a privately funded institution established by conservatives including Bari Weiss and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was gaining attention.
was announced
In late 2021. Musk in 2023.
filed papers
to establish his very own institution of higher learning.
Musk finally
announced his departure
in July 2024, after Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed a California law that prohibited schools from informing parents that their child was gay or transgendered against that child’s will. But the move to Texas, where moves against DEI have become a driving force in the state’s ruling Republican Party, also seems to have been about securing a freer hand for his businesses.
In February 2021, after announcing that the new Gigafactory that would build the Tesla Cybertruck would be in Austin, he
told
Rogan that Austin would become “biggest boomtown that America has seen in 50 years, at least — megaboom.”
Why did he establish his own town?
Besides his issues with California, Musk has frequently bristled at local government control. For instance, his objections to the state’s COVID-19 restrictions may also be seen as a conflict with the city of Fremont, which enacted an order shutting down his plant.
When SpaceX started launching rockets outside Boca Chica, Texas, Musk got into conflicts with the town’s administration due to his frequent closings of the public road leading to the popular beach. Each year, this beach attracted tens of thousands of tourists who contributed significantly to the local economy through their spending.
Fox reported
.
When he came to Austin in 2020, he asked then-Mayor Steve Adler to promise him that no one would slow Tesla down, the Journal reported. “What he wanted from the city was speed,” Adler, a Democrat, told the Journal in 2023.
Musk associates began buying up land in Bastrop County through shell companies like Gapped Bass
as early as 2021
— establishing the foundation for what would later be known as Snailbrook.
Unincorporated land in Texas counties, which isn’t governed by any established city, is how one local development specialist describes it.
called
“the wild, wild West.”
“They were in a hurry. They wanted things done yesterday, and if not yesterday then today,” Paul Pape, a former county judge in Bastrop, told NPR.
Why are locals concerned?
In Texas, a light regulatory touch often means air and water pollution.
Tesla’s rapid advancement has not been without costs; a 2024 probe conducted by the Journal
found
. Because Tesla wouldn’t shut down its production line to fix broken parts, the Gigafactory — one of the world’s largest car factories “dumped toxic pollutants into the environment near Austin for months.” That included 500,000 gallons of toxic water per day discharged into the Colorado River, as well as dumping untreated chemical-laden water into the city sewer system — without notifying city officials.
These incidents mirrored a conflict between Musk and Fremont regarding the 112 airspace violations at Tesla’s California plant, which accumulated over half a decade. In these instances, as uncovered by Journal reporter Susan Pulliam, the company informed regulators they would address the issues but failed to do so for an extended five-year timeframe.
“Mainstream media is a pipeline of deceit,” Musk
responded
Following the publication of the Journal’s report, this occurred on X.
However, outside of Austin, companies similar to Musk’s only need to worry about state and federal environmental regulators. Environmental regulators from Texas have discovered
repeated violations
of the Clean Water Act by Musk’s companies across the state, and the company has faced repeated fines.
However, these amounts are minor compared to the scale of those firms: $11,876 went to the Boring Company.
for failing
to keep untreated wastewater out of local creeks and rivers upstream of the Bastrop water supply; $150,000
for polluting
wetlands in South Texas.
In February, Texas environmental regulators
unaimously permitted
Musk plans to dispose of 358,000 gallons of wastewater into the wetlands of South Texas.
What does Elon Musk envision as the long-term future for his planned cities?
Musk’s commercial ventures—and his overall political agenda—are centered around the concept of colonizing unclaimed territories, particularly Mars.
In March, Musk announced plans for a first uncrewed mission to Mars at the end of 2026,
followed by human landings by 2031
— which would rely on equipment built and launched from towns like Starbase and Snailbrook.
He stated to The Guardian that “a self-sustaining colony on Mars”
would allow humanity to regenerate
after a nuclear war, and Bloomberg that the red planet
offers the sole option
“if we want to become a multi-planet civilization.”
If humans “can set up a colony on Mars, we can nearly definitely colonize the entire solar system as well, since this will create a robust economic incentive to enhance space travel,” he stated.
told
the science magazine Aeon.
Are Starbase and Snailbrook meant as models for Mars? In the near term, supporters believe they could be implemented worldwide. According to reports from Muskuniverse in November, Snailbrook’s planned bike lanes and pedestrian pathways aim “to bridge the gap between professional duties and personal time” by developing a “technology-focused city where work, residence, and recreation integrate effortlessly.”
That’s effectively what Walt Disney did in Orlando, urban historian Sam Gennawey
told The Guardian
. But Musk’s Texas settlements, he argued, aren’t delivering.
“He’s not being like Walt Disney and visionary in the sense of: ‘I’m going to create a different kind of community’” Genneway said.
Instead, he said, it recalled episodes in American history — where employers used their ownership of employee residences a means to discipline them. “What Musk is doing is much more akin to
Pullman
or
Lowell
, where it’s just housing nearby owned by the guy who owns the company,”
For someone who
demanded
that post-takeover X employees work “long hours at high intensity” and who
brags
about his and DOGE employees habit of bedding down in federal buildings, the Guardian argued, this vision amounted to a kind of “dystopia.”
Instead of saying ‘join us and enjoy good housing,’ the message from these new technology industry company towns appears to be more like ‘why return home when you can reside where you work?’
For enthusiasts, though, Snailbrook and Starbase represent a glimpse into the future.
“What’s happening here is incredible,” Kit Frederic, an Oregon native who moved to the unincorporated area outside Starbase,
told
Poltico just before Saturday’s vote. “Someday every state in the union is going to want something like this.”
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