STARBASE, TEXAS?

Elon Musk’s company town: SpaceX employees vote to create ‘Starbase’

Residents – most of them SpaceX workers – in remote Texas community approve plan to create new city

 

By Nick Robins-Early 

The Guardian

May 3, 2025

 

The SpaceX facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

 

Voters in a small patch of south Texas voted on Saturday to give Elon Musk a town to call his own, officially creating a new city called Starbase in the area where Musk’s SpaceX holds rocket launches.

A couple of hundred residents of what was previously known as Boca Chica decided to make their unincorporated neighborhoods into a town that will grant them the authority to pass city ordinances.

The ballot, which also named a senior SpaceX representative as its mayor with 100% of the early vote, was never really in doubt.

Most of the 283 eligible voters were SpaceX employees or had connections to the company, whose billionaire chief has long wanted a human mission to Mars

“Starbase, Texas,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X, “Is now a real city!”

His post came after polls closed and unofficial results published by Cameron County showed an unambiguous 97.7% backing for the project.

Musk himself is registered to vote, Cameron County election coordinator Remi Garza told Agence France-Presse, but the South African-born 53-year-old had yet to cast his ballot when the early voting period closed on 29 April.

The creation of Starbase puts Musk in the unusual position of holding sway over a company town, a distinction that has more in common with Gilded Age industrialists than most modern US businesses. It is a small victory for the world’s richest man as he pivots away from his job as de facto leader of the “department of government efficiency” – a role that has elicited furious backlash and hurt his public image as well as his businesses.

Much like with Doge, Musk will not officially be in charge of Starbase. The entirety of the future city revolves around SpaceX, however, and it is almost entirely made up of the company’s employees and their kin. The Starbase population, as of 2025, is a little over 500 people, 260 of whom are SpaceX employees. The others are mostly family members of workers, according to Bloomberg.

The town’s new mayor, 36-year-old Bobby Peden, has worked at SpaceX since 2013 and is vice-president of test and launch operations in Texas. Peden, along with two other city commissioner candidates who are also SpaceX employees, ran unopposed.

Starbase sits on a tiny piece of land near the Mexican border on a small bay that feeds into the Gulf of Mexico. Prefabricated houses, airstreams and palm trees line the streets. An imperious golden bust of Musk stands nine feet tall outside the town. A plaque on its pedestal reads “ELON AKA Memelord”.

Last month, vandals defaced the statue by peeling off layers of foam and fiberglass from its cheeks. There is an employee-only restaurant called Astropub with a neon red “Occupy Mars” sign behind the bar. One of the main boulevards is called “Memes Street”.

 

A visitor photographs a large bust of Elon Musk in Boca Chica. 

 

Although creating Starbase is likely somewhat of a vanity project, one which Musk has been touting for years, it does grant the potential city and its SpaceX leadership powers over what to do with the land. Company workers submitted identical statements to a legislative hearing in April arguing that creating the town would help with logistics and coordination around issues such as road closures during test launches, the Associated Press reported.

Opposing Starbase

The incorporation of Starbase has also faced protests and pushback from others in the area. The South Texas Environmental Justice Network activist group has been holding protests and urging Texans to email their state representatives to oppose the incorporation. The group argued that creating Starbase would allow SpaceX to close access to the public beach in the town whenever it wants and block others from using the public land.

“Boca Chica Beach is meant for the people, not Elon Musk to control,” the organization said in a statement on its site. “For generations, residents have visited Boca Chica beach for fishing, swimming, recreation, and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe has spiritual ties to the beach. They should be able to keep access.”

Musk has in previous years made grand pronouncements about the future of Starbase while urging employees to move to the town. “Starbase will grow by several thousand people over the next year or two,” he posted on X in 2021.

SpaceX has become an increasingly valuable part of Musk’s empire as Tesla’s performance has tanked and the government has turned to SpaceX for billions of dollars in contracts related to space travel.

Musk has relocated his primary residence and businesses to Texas in recent years. He lives in a $35m sprawling compound in Austin that houses three separate mansions. During his backing of Trump’s re-election last year, he temporarily uprooted and moved to the swing state of Pennsylvania.

Musk then took up residence in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building while serving as senior adviser to Donald Trump, but left the White House in late April as he shifts back to overseeing his companies.