The “company town” is largely an artifact of a bygone era—a vestige of an unhappy time in American history when wealthy land barons controlled society, and labor rights, at least as we know them today, did not yet exist. Today, you’d be hard pressed to find many of these corporate slums active in the U.S., but that hasn’t stopped Elon Musk from trying to bring them back in style.
The Wall Street Journal has a new story out on SpaceX’s ongoing attempt to incorporate its own town in a region of the Texas Gulf Coast, where the company’s Starbase, which it uses to test and launch rockets, is located. Currently, over 3,400 SpaceX employees and contractors are active around the base, and the company has increasingly sought to build up infrastructure and amenities to provide for that growing workforce.
Musk’s company filed paperwork to turn Starbase into a company town in December. In February, the Texas county where Starbase is located approved a local election to let its residents decide whether the town could be incorporated or not. That election is set to be held on Saturday. According to the Journal, the town would “spread over multiple properties near a state highway and include roughly 247 lots with housing on them.”
Starbase General Manager Kathryn Lueders has said that turning Starbase into a real town would allow the company to effectively provide “civic functions.” Those functions would include the “management of the roads, utilities, and the provision of schooling and medical care for the residents.” The company claims it annually spends some $1.5 billion on the operations surrounding Starbase.
Several potential government officials—all SpaceX employees—have been named as well. The Journal writes that Bobby Peden, a current SpaceX vice president of the company’s Texas test and launch operations, would be the mayor of the town. Meanwhile, two other SpaceX employees, Jordan Buss and Jenna Petrzelka, would be two of its commissioners.
Texas residents don’t seem particularly excited about the planned community. Politico recently spoke to community activists living near Starbase, all of whom predictably pilloried the effort: “It’s the richest man on the planet using us as a testing ground,” one organizer said. “Elon Musk is on his way to colonizing Mars. First, he’s trying to colonize this community.”
Musk is always building something and, lately, he seems most interested in his own urban projects. In 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk was plotting a “utopian” town outside of Austin, Texas, that had a hilariously bad name: “Snailbrook.” Since then, the town has been under construction but, as of September, only consisted of a small number of buildings, including 15 modular homes, a gym, playground, and swimming pool. Other tech industrialists with ties to Musk have repeatedly pushed for what they call “Freedom Cities“—billionaire-backed libertarian enclaves that will be governed by corporations rather than traditional governments.
In short: The nostalgia for 19th-century-style capitalism is apparently strong in America’s new gilded class, and they’re doing their best to bring us back to the “good old days” when workers lived where they worked and worked where they lived and answered (mostly) to the boss.
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