Elon Musk wants to make SpaceX’s base an official company town

SpaceX’s latest endeavor is to make its Starbase, a Texas community where the company launches rockets and where some employees and their families live, into its very own city.

Elon Musk’s aerospace firm filed on Thursday to incorporate Starbase, which is near Brownsville in South Texas, into a city. The filing was on behalf of the “entire Starbase community” and emphasized that incorporation would help Starbase “streamline” the process of building amenities for the “hundreds already calling it home.”

“To continue growing the workforce necessary to rapidly develop and manufacture Starship, we need the ability to grow Starbase as a community,” Kathryn Lueders, Starbase’s general manager, wrote in a letter. “That is why we are requesting that Cameron County call an election to enable the incorporation of Starbase as the newest city in the Rio Grande Valley.”

A June report from the office of Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño, Jr., the county’s top elected official, found that 3,400 full-time SpaceX employees and contractors work at the Starbase facility where the company builds and launches rockets. The company also generates some 21,400 indirect jobs in the local community.

Musk first mentioned incorporating Starbase in 2021, writing on social media that he was “creating” the city and naming its leader “the Doge,” a reference to the doing that inspired the cryptocurrency of the same name and — much later — Musk’s own outside of government commission. Treviño told the Associated Press that Thursday marked the first official petition from SpaceX related to incorporation.

“Our legal and elections administration will review the petition, see whether or not it complied with all of the statutory requirements and then we’ll go from there,” Treviño said.

Although Starbase is on the rise, it’s not Musk’s only company town. He’s transformed the rural community of Bastrop into somewhat of a hub for several of his companies.

Both the Boring Company and SpaceX’s Starlink have facilities in Bastrop, while Musk’s nearby “Hyperloop Plaza” hosts the “Boring Bodega” and a salon. X, has said it was hiring workers for a new support center that will also be based at Hyperloop Plaza. Ad Astra, a private school run by Musk’s Foundation, is also based in Bastrop.

The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Musk aims to build his own “Texas Utopia” incorporated in Bastrop County, which is some 35 miles away from Austin, where Tesla (TSLA+0.76%) is headquartered and has a sprawling factory. Locals have repeatedly raised concerns about the companies’ effect on the environment; Musk’s Tesla, SpaceX, and Boring have repeatedly fallen afoul of environmental regulations.

Sherwood News reports that the company town, named Snailbrook after Boring’s mascot, “feels like a rushed job with unfinished walls and a broken-down playground.” Instead of a town of 110 single-family homes, the town is “mostly” just a bodega, a small school, and some 15 trailers placed behind Boring’s facilities.

Although they’ve mostly gone out of fashion, company towns aren’t exclusive to Musk. The Walt Disney Co. (DIS-0.15%), Meta (META0.00%), Google (GOOGL+0.36%), and Amazon (AMZN+0.52%) are all experimenting with new company towns, although some are more discrete than others, according to Business Insider.

While Amazon isn’t directly building housing, it has committed to supporting housing development in areas near Arlington, Virginia, where it landed its HQ2. For comparison, Menlo Park, California, in 2022 voted in favor of Meta’s 59-acre Willow Village, also known as “Zucktown” after CEO Mark Zuckerberg.