Elon Musk Is Building His Own Town In Texas, Hundrends Already Live There

CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, is looking to incorporate a town in coastal South Texas.

SpaceX’s launch site, “Starbase,” already has hundreds of SpaceX employees living nearby, and earlier in December, employees filed a petition to create a new town.

The Starbase community has nearly 500 inhabitants, including 219 primary residents and 100 children.

The New York Times reported the area that employees are looking to incorporate is 1.5 square miles.

Elon Musk's Plan For His Own Texas City 'Starbase': A Corporate Utopia https://t.co/0TIF7ZXiBY pic.twitter.com/se0pFY0oOS

— NDTV WORLD (@NDTVWORLD) December 26, 2024

Elon Musk is making SpaceX its own town! pic.twitter.com/K8TLqWNYEX

— 🥷🦅Austin Petersen 🇺🇲🥋 (@AP4Liberty) December 13, 2024

Here’s what NDTV reported:

Now, Musk is planning to establish a town in coastal South Texas, and creating a new municipality in Texas requires residents and voter support from a majority. Since July, the SpaceX launch site known as Starbase has already become home to many employees.

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Per NYT, earlier this month, the employees took a big step towards making Starbase a town and started taking signatures and filing a petition to hold an election.

The ‘Stabase community’ boasts about 500 inhabitants, including around 219 primary residents and 100 children. According to the petition, the town would be slightly larger than Central Park, covering 1.5 square miles and almost all residents are renters and work for SpaceX.

“If you create your own city, and it’s a relatively small area now, you have kind of control over that area,” Robert Greer, an associate professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University told AP.

“Incorporating Starbase will streamline the processes required to build the amenities necessary to make the area a world-class place to live – for the hundreds already calling it home, as well as for prospective workers eager to help build humanity’s future in space,” Kathryn Lueders, Starbase’s general manager, stated in a letter to the county.

While SpaxeX rapidly expands in the area, some locals have pushed back. Earlier this year, a group called Save RGV sued SpaceX over allegations of environmental violations and dumping polluted water into the nearby bay.

Employees of SpaceX have filed a formal petition to create the city of Starbase. Its first mayor would be a security manager for the company.
https://t.co/W0fsXIWsLL

— Visit Starbase @ Boca Chica 🚀 (@VisitStarbase) December 24, 2024

Per The New York Times:

Over the past few years, Elon Musk has expanded his footprint in Texas, moving his companies from California and building offices, warehouses and manufacturing plants across a growing number of Texas counties.

Now Mr. Musk is trying to do something that few, if any, titans of industry have done in a century: create his own company town.

Mr. Musk has long talked about his desire to make a new town — which he hopes to call Starbase — in coastal South Texas, where his rocket launch company, SpaceX, is based.

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For years, the plan did not appear to be moving forward in any official way, in part because creating a new municipality in Texas requires a certain number of residents and support from a majority of voters.

But in that time, SpaceX employees have packed into newly refurbished midcentury homes and temporary housing — some of it in the form of silver Airstream trailers — in the shadow of the company’s rockets.

Then this month, company employees who live around its offices and launch site took the first major step toward incorporating a town, gathering signatures and filing an official petition to hold an election.

The petition, filed with top officials in Cameron County and shared with The New York Times based on a public records request, provides some of the first details on the size and the operation of the new city that Mr. Musk and his company are envisioning.

If authorized by the county, the election would allow voters to cast a ballot for a slate of three new city officials, including the city’s first mayor. The petition suggests that the mayor will be SpaceX’s security manager, Gunnar Milburn.

The Starbase petition describes a community of around 500 current inhabitants, including at least 219 primary residents and more than 100 children, in an area at the very end of State Highway 4 by Boca Chica Beach, where SpaceX launches many of its rockets.

The town would be about 1.5 square miles, a little larger than Central Park but small by Texas standards.