Inside Elon Musk's SpaceX Company Town, Starbase, Texas

In the driving wind off the Gulf of Mexico, under the looming 480-foot-tall steel launch towers called “Mechazilla,” a group of local kids take turns whacking an Elon Musk-shaped piñata.

A crowd laughs as the youngest, a girl who looks about four, slaps at Musk’s papier-mâché head with a thin stick. An older boy turns his stick into a spear and plunges it into Musk’s stomach, which splits open revealing a trove of fruit snacks. Someone yells “Eat the rich,” and the kids rush in to scoop up handfuls of the billionaire’s guts.

Moments before, the election results had been announced. Starbase, the Cameron County development two miles down the road that houses the test facility for SpaceX rockets and is home to some 500 people, officially voted to become Texas’s newest city. The final tally was a lopsided 212 to six — not a surprise since the vast majority of voters were SpaceX employees, and their boss, who now rests on the beach as a battered piñata, had publicly pushed for incorporation. Protesters, mostly from the neighboring city of Brownsville, Texas, gathered on Boca Chica Beach to express frustration that they weren’t allowed to vote in an election which will surely impact them.

Since 2014, the $350 billion space-tech company has dramatically transformed this region in the deep south of Texas, known broadly as the Rio Grande Valley. New housing developments with names like Lunar Estates and Starship Landing are cropping up along the highway between Brownsville and Starbase. Local businesses have taken on rocket-themed branding — you can grab hot dogs at Space Dog Station or seafood at SpaceFish Mariscos. Musk stans have erected maybe not entirely ironic shrines to their hero throughout the region — including a 10-foot-tall deformed, gold-spray-painted plaster statue that guards the highway to Boca Chica.

People protest against Elon Musk incorporating the Boca Chica Village neighborhood, where the SpaceX facilities are located, becoming its own municipality.

GABRIEL CARDENAS/AFP/Getty Images

Every couple of months, rocket launches shake houses within a 15-mile radius with the force of a moderately powerful earthquake, and some have burned acres of wilderness, blown out windows, and showered the region in a drizzle of melted cement. SpaceX dumps hundreds of thousands of gallons of water used in launches into the neighboring south bay, and has destroyed nests of vulnerable shorebirds. Boca Chica, a popular local spot known as the “poor people’s beach,” can now only be accessed via a highway controlled by SpaceX, and has begun frequently closing to the public to accommodate SpaceX launches.

Editor’s picks

These changes have angered locals from Brownsville and the beach towns of Port Isabel and South Padre Island across the bay from the launch site, and brought opposition like this protest today. “These guys want to go to Mars. Let them go to Mars,” Rene Medrano, who owns a ranch along the highway from Brownsville to Starbase, tells the crowd. “The people here want to enjoy the beach. Let us enjoy the beach. This should be open forever.”

But SpaceX has also brought jobs and investment to the area, among the poorest in the country. A Cameron County release claims that the site employs more than 3,400 full-time SpaceX workers — many employees live in neighboring towns, while a couple hundred live in Starbase itself — and that it has created 21,400 indirect jobs, while generating $3 billion of local infrastructure investment. With that, along with tactfully deployed campaign contributions, Musk has gained support of Cameron County politicians.

The rockets have polarized the region and forced Cameron County residents to pick sides. It’s one of the economic development debates that occur in so many local governments, only this one has been turbocharged by literal rockets shot off by the world’s richest man, who doesn’t seem concerned about making mistakes or enemies.

Related Content

With the incorporation vote, Musk’s power and influence over the region will grow even less restrained, as he will control what is essentially a modern-day company town. With it, comes a new mayor and board of commissioners, most of whom are at-will SpaceX employees. The new municipality will be able to levy taxes on its residents, oversee permitting and zoning, initiate eminent domain, apply for municipal bonds, and charter a police department.

It’s a new development in company towns, according to Harvard researcher Brian Highsmith, who studies the impact of corporate power on local governments. The company towns of the Gilded Age were generally not officially incorporated so as to avoid the democratic mechanisms that could impede corporate power. “In fact the absence of those processes was in many ways the whole reason for their operation as a company town,” Highsmith says. But in the Rio Grande Valley, instead of opting out of the government, Musk has simply opted to become the government.

As he steps away from his political project at the federal level, his power and influence over this rocket-fueled fiefdom on the Gulf continues to grow stronger, whether the locals like it or not.

HOMER POMPA IS A 75-YEAR-OLD Vietnam Veteran, with a weathered face and wispy white goatee, who lives in an RV three miles from the SpaceX launch site with several rheumy-eyed dobermans and two wild goats. He’s retired on VA benefits, and in his free time, he watches YouTube on his phone and sings raucous blues songs at local bars. He bought this land in the early aughts, back when there were only a few dozen residents, in hopes of finding isolation at what felt like the end of the world.

But two decades later, a small city has formed around him. As of May 3, he is a resident of the City of Starbase, though he chose not to vote in the election. “You can’t stop progress,” Pompa tells me as we chat in a plywood shack behind his RV, underneath three massive wooden crosses and a 20-foot-tall watchtower he’s erected to view the launches. “He has the money — he can do what he damn well pleases. Why vote if you know who’s going to win?”

Not long after Pompa bought his land, Musk, then still a liberal darling who was getting glowing press for sharing his electric car patents, set his sights on the neighborhood as a test site for SpaceX rockets. While the company already had been launching rockets from government-owned facilities in Cape Canaveral, Florida, this would be a test site entirely operated by SpaceX. The spot was chosen for its latitude and relative seclusion — Musk described it as “an empty sandbar” in a recent post on X — though, as Pompa will point out, there were people living there.

Importantly, state and local politicians were willing to play ball. As Musk mulled other potential testing sites, Cameron County courted him by offering the company a 10-year break on property taxes. The Texas State Legislature was even more obsequious, approving a $15 million incentive package in 2013. They also passed a law that exempted space-flight entities from liability for nuisance damages caused by launches, and granted the company an exception to a provision in the Texas constitution guaranteeing residents unrestricted beach access. The latter provision allowed SpaceX to coordinate with a Cameron County commission to shut down access to Boca Chica Beach during tests.

With the goodies lined up, Musk announced that SpaceX had officially chosen Boca Chica as its launch site in August 2014, and Pompa watched as the neighborhood began to grow around him. He and his handful of neighbors began receiving offers on their property, which he declined, but some accepted.

Homer Pompa lives in an RV three miles from the SpaceX launch site. He moved here in the early aughts.

Courtesy Guthrie Scrimgeour

By 2019, SpaceX had launched its first rocket from Boca Chica, the Starhopper — a silo-shaped behemoth that was able to successfully lift off and land. The first launch so enthralled Pompa that it inspired him to write and perform a psychedelic blues song called “Half Moon Jam.” But after a while, the rockets became routine. “It’s like sex,” he says. “Once you’ve had it, you’ve had it.”

Later tests have been less successful, though perhaps more exciting. Most dramatic was an April 20, 2023, test of the SpaceX Starship, which melted the launchpad and showered the region as far as Port Isabel in a fine cement powder. Pompa remembers a chunk of cement crashing through a windshield on his street. The two most recent tests this year were also spectacular failures, with rockets exploding over the Caribbean, scattering debris, and forcing nearby aircraft to scramble.

Despite the setbacks, the area has continued to grow. Work moved at a breakneck pace — buildings sprung up and were abruptly demolished when no longer needed. It’s become a passion project for Musk, who keeps a house nearby, and often posts glowingly about the new city. “Starbase is so cool,” he tweeted last August. New neighbors — mostly SpaceX employees or fans — kept moving in near Pompa’s land, which grew into a small subdivision. He doesn’t know many of them, and they mostly keep to themselves. Pompa has never met the billionaire either, but he’s developed a pretty negative opinion of him. “I’m not a cultist,” he says. “I fought for America. I didn’t fight for some South African guy to come over here and tell everyone what to do.”

Like the piñata protesters, he is concerned about completely losing access to Boca Chica Beach, where he’s gone fishing since he was a kid. Even more troubling is the possibility that the new town could use the power of eminent domain to legally seize his land for a project deemed to be in the public interest. “They can file it, and I’ll wait,” Pompa tells me, his eyes darkening. “I was good at ambushes.”

THE VIBES ARE OFF IN BOCA CHICA VILLAGE, the small neighborhood right next to the SpaceX facility about a mile away from Pompa’s RV. It’s made up of several rows of ranch homes, remnants of pre-SpaceX neighbors who have mostly moved out, along with clusters of storage container apartments and airstream trailers arranged on turf lawns. There are a couple of small parks and a restaurant called the Astropub, all of which are SpaceX property closed to the general public. I’m visiting the day before the election, and it’s pretty quiet, with only a few people out and about.

The neighborhood features the highest concentration of Cybertrucks I’ve encountered, though there are plenty of pickups that belong to local Brownsville day laborers, as well. Two-thirds of people living here are men, with an average age of about 27, according to a New York Times analysis. It’s a place for transplants — most residents have no history of voting in Texas.

When former SpaceX employee Joshuah Gardner applied for housing in Boca Chica Village in 2023, he noticed a strange stipulation on his lease agreement. If they were fired from SpaceX, he remembers the lease reading, the renter would be required to vacate their property in 10 days. These firings, he calls them “purges,” were very frequent while he was working there and felt arbitrary. He remembers Musk once visiting the town while he was living there temporarily in 2021, where he interviewed supervisors and inspected the row of airstream trailers. Later that day, he says, dozens of workers were laid off. While the threat of job loss is always stressful, there’s an added layer of stress here because, at Boca Chica Village, a firing also means an eviction.

According to Gardner, nondisclosure agreements keep workers from discussing details of their jobs with non-SpaceX employees. “It’s really hard to have a social life outside of SpaceX,” he says. “Because you can’t talk to anybody about anything.” Still, before he was caught up in a 2023 purge, he loved the work. “That’s something about it you can’t buy,” he tells me. “Being a part of a mission like that.”

Glassdoor reviews show a similar attitude toward the site among workers who describe fulfilling work in a pressure cooker. “You are constantly in fear of being fired, and if you have uprooted your family to come to Brownsville to take the job, you cannot afford to lose it because there is nowhere else for an engineer to work,” writes one reviewer who identifies himself as a senior mechanical engineer, in a post titled “Don’t Be Fooled by YouTube.”

While there aren’t many residents outside, several private-security vehicles conduct a patrol along Memes Street, near Musk’s house. If there’s a crime in the village, these patrols are generally the first call, Gardner says, rather than the county police. When I wander off the main road through a row of Airstream trailers, on what I think is a public sidewalk, I’m quickly stopped by a burly security guard dressed in a military-grade tactical vest. He informs me that I’ve entered private property, and escorts me to the road 10 feet away, where he watches me from his car as I walk down the street.

Airstreams lined up in Boca Chica Village near where SpaceX launches its rockets.

Courtesy Guthrie Scrimgeour

I greet one guy wearing a black polo and a SpaceX employee badge, who is friendly, but tells me he isn’t allowed to talk to me. The whole setup reminds me of what I’ve heard about historical company towns throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, where the threat of firing and eviction from company-owned housing kept people from speaking out about their bosses or organizing for better conditions. These towns were places where “workplace democracy and speech was almost always sharply regulated by the employer,” according to researcher Highsmith, who recently published a paper that discusses Musk’s efforts to establish modern company towns in Texas. He defines a company town as a place with “an absence of friction between government and industry,” a definition which he found Starbase to meet both before and after incorporation.

Following the May 3 vote, Starbase has moved quickly. According to documents recently filed with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, SpaceX plans to develop a $22 million community center, a $20 million school, a medical clinic, and a multifamily housing complex.

But their broader plans have remained opaque. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment on this article. One former Boca Chica resident tells me she’s resorted to tweeting at Musk to try to figure out what’s going on. Starbase released a statement on X on May 3 reading vaguely, “Becoming a city will help us continue building the best community possible for the men and women building the future of humanity’s place in space.” The new government did not elaborate on what exactly this would entail in the lead-up to the election. New Mayor Bobby Peden, a SpaceX vice president of Test and Launch, commissioner Jenna Petrzelka, a former SpaceX engineering manager and the wife of a SpaceX vice president, and Jordan Buss, the senior director of Environmental Health and Safety for SpaceX, have not spoken publicly about their plans for the city, and did not respond to our requests for comment. Campaign platforms weren’t particularly necessary, since all three ran unopposed.

ACROSS THE BAY IN THE TOWN OF PORT ISABEL, at a space-themed restaurant called the Hopper Haus, barflies discuss last night’s rocket-engine test as if it had been a football game or a must-watch Sunday night TV show. This one hadn’t been so loud — it was conducted at Massey’s Point, a new test site closer to Brownsville, not the facility directly across the bay — but it seems that something went wrong, pushing back the next launch to later in the month. Since SpaceX moved in, the community has become dramatically polarized.

Retired surgical assistant and jazz singer Kim Zimmerman takes me through her house in the Long Island Village neighborhood of Port Isabel, a middle-class gated community along a canal that leads to the bay. They’re about five miles from the main launch site. She and her partner Jim moved here in 2018, and have since seen their home more than double in value, as the neighborhood has become a target for SpaceX employees avoiding the company town environment in Boca Chica.

She shows me the several cracks that recently appeared in her popcorn ceiling, which she believes are caused by the launches. Out here, they feel like an earthquake — “a 4.5 or more,” she says, which spooks her cats. “I’m all for space exploration,” she says. “I just think it was built too close to civilization. What’s going to happen when the big one blows up on the launchpad and rains shrapnel all over our houses?” Another neighbor shows me how he has glued down vases and photos so they aren’t shaken off the wall during launches. He’s not upset about SpaceX, though, in part because they allow him to make some extra cash AirBnB’ing a room to rocket fans.

While Zimmerman is troubled by the launches, Doug Kinne, who lives down the street, sees them as a pretty unambiguous good. The 72-year-old retired ski instructor and restaurant owner’s house is full of SpaceX-themed collectibles — a shovel from the Starbase groundbreaking, a model Cybertruck, and pieces of rocket that washed up in the bay. His place is the closest in Port Isabel to the launch site, and he gets a great view from his balcony, where he hosts watch parties for neighbors and traveling space enthusiasts. “I mean, you’re at the future,” he says. “It’s an amazing thing.” His late wife, who passed away in 2022, was an even bigger rocket fan than him, and her ashes rest in a three-foot-tall rocket-shaped urn. Kinne has noticed cracks in his ceiling as well, but he doesn’t believe they could have come as a result of the launches. Hurricanes, he thinks, are the more likely culprit. When I ask if the cracks in other peoples’ houses might be the result of launches, he responds firmly. “They’re not,” he says. “That’s the thing.”

There seems to be a correlation between how people feel about Musk’s recent actions in the Trump administration and how they feel about the rocket launches. Before his abrupt fallout with the president, Musk pursued an aggressive cost-cutting regime as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, purging federal employees and terminating government contracts — while leaving his own contracts, including those funding much of the work at SpaceX, untouched. Some anti-SpaceX protesters on the beach cited examples of how they had been personally harmed by Elon’s DOGE’ing, including one who had been put on leave from her job at a Palo Alto Battlefield National Park earlier this year. Others in Cameron County — which supported Trump in the 2024 election — like Kinne, or Keith Reynolds, who lives within the boundaries of the new city, are fans of Musk’s work in the Trump administration. Reynolds hasn’t met him personally, but he has a lot of faith in the billionaire. “Will the formation of Starbase be good for me? I don’t know the answer to that yet,” Reynolds tells me. “But I’m going to support Elon.”

Doug Kinne’s house is full of SpaceX-themed collectibles.

Courtesy Guthrie Scrimgeour

LETTING SOMEONE LAUNCH A 150-TON ROCKET in your backyard takes a lot of faith, or a lot of money. As SpaceX’s expansion into the region has brought jobs and investment for some locals, it has also brought economic benefits to the pocketbooks of local politicians. A 2024 Reuters investigation found that in 2014, as he was accumulating his incentive package, Musk had showered state and local politicians from both parties with $150,000. In the ensuing decade, businesses associated with SpaceX and company lobbyists contributed more than $500,000 to the campaigns of two dozen elected officials from the region. One local politician bought and sold land around Starbase for a profit.

More recently, as the SpaceX venture has spurred several environmental and public access lawsuits, Musk has set his sights on the Texas courts. In October 2024, he made a $2 million donation to the Judicial Fairness PAC, which backs Republicans in state judicial races. Notably, the PAC backed campaigns of Republican judges in the 13th Circuit Appellate Court, which covers Cameron County, and which had ruled against SpaceX in a case about public access to the Boca Chica beach in early 2024. After the election this November, the court became entirely Republican, likely more amenable to SpaceX and Musk.

Musk made another $1 million donation last year to Texans for Lawsuit Reform PAC, which funds pro-business conservative candidates in legislative and judicial races. They were the top benefactors to the two new Republican justices in the Cameron County appellate court, granting each $7,500. Two of Texans for Lawsuit Reform PAC’s largest beneficiaries at the legislature were Rep. Janie Lopez and Sen. Adam Hinojosa, who received $854,849 and $700,000 from the PAC, respectively.

The PAC was the single largest donor to both politicians, who were the driving forces behind a State Legislature measure this year that would benefit SpaceX. A bill introduced by Lopez in the House and by Hinojosa in the Senate would transfer the right to control highway closures on the road leading to Boca Chica Beach from an independent commission to the new municipality of Starbase, essentially removing any level of public oversight from these decisions. (Lopez and Hinojosa did not respond to requests for comment.)

The latter bill was a step too far even for generally pro-SpaceX Judge Eddie Treviño Jr., Cameron County’s top executive, who spoke out against the move this March. “We think that has potential to create conflict going forward that we don’t think is absolutely needed or necessary,” Treviño told local news. But the pushback was too little too late. After briefly appearing dead amid public pressure, the beach-access measure was revived in an amendment to an unrelated bill, and was passed by the legislature on June 1.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket launches from Starbase during its second test flight in Boca Chica, Texas, on Nov. 18, 2023.

TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images

ON MAY 27, THE ROADS TO BOCA CHICA BEACH CLOSED for a launch. Homer Pompa perched in his tower and waited. In Port Isabel, Doug Kinne gathered a group of rocket enthusiasts on his front porch, while others in the neighborhood braced for impact.

As the sun set over Boca Chica Beach, the 400-foot-tall Starship, the largest rocket ever built, was loaded into the Mechazilla launch tower. The rocket test was supposed to redeem the two recent failures. This time, SpaceX hoped the Starship would reach space and release several Starlink satellites before reentering the atmosphere and conducting a controlled landing in the Indian Ocean.

On the live feed, SpaceX engineers began a countdown from 40. White smoke billowing, the 33 powerful Raptor engines activated, and the launch pad was deluged with tens of thousands of gallons of cooling water. With a massive blast and shockwave that rattled Pompa’s tower, the engines pushed the rocket skyward. It wobbled slightly, before it shot up and out of sight.

Fans watched on a stream as the Starship soared through the stratosphere, further than the past few missions had managed. But, at the edge of space, things started to go wrong. The bay door, which was supposed to open to release the satellites, was jammed shut. Then the spacecraft sprung a propellant leak. The rocket spiraled wildly out of control, tumbling back toward Earth. As it reentered the atmosphere, the ship broke apart, careening into the Indian Ocean. Meanwhile, the booster rocket dropped into the Gulf of Mexico, debris washing up along the beach in the neighboring town of Matamoros, Mexico. Musk had announced on X that he would give a speech explaining “the Mars game plan in Starbase” following the launch, but it was canceled after the rocket was lost. The setback triggered an Federal Aviation Administration mishap investigation, the third of the year against the company.

The following week, Musk’s cushy relationship with the Trump administration suffered a similar disintegration. Musk stepped down from his role at DOGE on May 28, and quickly began criticizing Trump’s flagship “Big Beautiful Bill” in a series of tweets on X. The pair of billionaires exchanged barbs on social media, and Musk’s rockets were an important leverage point in the feud, with Trump threatening to cancel the billions of dollars in SpaceX’s contracts, and Musk threatening to decommission the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft which had recently been used to return NASA astronauts from the International Space Station.

But the failed launch and the squabbles with the President didn’t slow the forward momentum of Starbase. Launches will be happening much more frequently after the FAA granted approval to increase the number of annual launches from 5 to 25 annually. Two days after the launch, Starbase held its first public meeting, where the town swore in city leaders, appointed a new city administrator and declared May 29th “Starbase Day.” The following day, they approved a request for a $1.5 million loan from SpaceX.

That day, neighbors in Boca Chica Village received notices describing plans for a new Starbase zoning regime, which would establish what land in specific areas of Starbase can be used for, and which included a troubling line:

THE CITY OF STARBASE IS HOLDING A HEARING THAT WILL DETERMINE WHETHER YOU MAY LOSE THE RIGHT TO CONTINUE USING YOUR PROPERTY FOR ITS CURRENT USE, PLEASE READ THIS NOTICE CAREFULLY.

Inside Elon Musk’s SpaceX Company Town, Starbase, Texas

Tags: