What is Starbase, the town Musk is building on a Texas coast

Elon Musk wants to bring the fictional settlement of Starbase – a futuristic human outpost in space – to Earth by building a new town under the same name on a coastal strip in south Texas, home to his $350 billion rocket launch company SpaceX.

Incorporating a ‘company town’ in the US is a feat that few, if any, titans of industry have achieved in a century.

If everything goes according to plan, Musk will soon have a town for himself with its own police and fire departments and the SpaceX security manager serving as its first mayor.

Responsibilities like managing utilities, schools and hospitals – civil functions that SpaceX currently performs itself because of the proposed town’s remote location – will then shift to an “appropriate public body”, according to a letter that SpaceX submitted to Judge Eddie Trevino Jr of Cameron County on December 12.

Starbase will also be eligible for state and federal grants once it receives the status of a stand-alone township.

It will also be able to condemn any property within the town limits and reserve the right to keep away any business it may consider “undesirable”.

How Boca Chica became Musk’s homebase

Boca Chica, the area within Cameron County where the proposed town of Starbase is located, is a scrubby version of paradise at the southernmost tip of Texas, according to Walter Issacson, the writer of the eccentric billionaire’s authorised biography called Elon Musk.

SpaceX first set up shop in the area around 2014 by building a “rudimentary launchpad” as a backup to primary launch sites in Florida’s Cape Canaveral and California’s Vandenberg.

However, the rocket launch facilities mostly “gathered dust until 2018”.

Musk then decided to make it a dedicated base for Starship, the world’s most powerful launch vehicle designed to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond.

Since the immense size of Starship would make it difficult for SpaceX to build it in the existing production facility in California and transport it to Boca Chica, Musk decided to develop a new rocket manufacturing plant in Texas.

Initially, there were only three “massive hangar-like tents” for the assembly lines and three “high bays” made of metal to accommodate the Starships vertically.

Musk retrofitted an old building on the property with office cubicles, a conference room and a canteen.

Given that the nearest motels were 23 miles away in Brownsville, SpaceX set up a trailer park in the proposed town to serve as living quarters for the roughly 500 engineers and construction workers.

But what really elevated the status of Boca Chica as Musk’s homebase was his nasty encounter with the state of California, a Democratic stronghold, at the beginning of the pandemic.

Musk showed defiance when California issued a stay-at-home order in March 2020 as the Fremont factory of Tesla – the world’s most valuable automaker and the primary source of his $468 billion net worth – was starting to produce a new car model.

Musk kept the factory open and challenged the county sheriff to make arrests. “I will be on the line with everyone else… If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me,” he said.

Even though Musk eventually prevailed in the fight against the state of California, the episode left him disgruntled with liberal politics of the Democratic Party, Isaacson wrote.

As a result, Musk expanded his footprint in Texas in the subsequent years by moving his multitude of companies from California to a number of Texas localities, including Cameron County.

The tussle with the state of California became a factor in Musk’s “political evolution”. “He went from being a fanboy and fundraiser for Barack Obama to railing against progressive Democrats,” wrote Isaacson.

Musk poured $270 million in the November election to become the largest political donor in US history, raising concerns about the multi-billionaire buying influence in the incoming Trump administration.

Musk will work closely with Trump in a semi-formal role in a yet-to-be-created Department of Government Efficiency. This role will allow Musk to influence how government spending is managed, potentially aligning federal policies with his business interests.

What we know of Starbase so far

Musk has been informally calling the area around SpaceX facilities Starbase for many years now.

Musk himself is a resident of the area, even though he did not personally sign the petition to the county judge demanding an election over the issue of the town incorporation.

According to The New York Times, the Starbase petition describes a community of around 500 current inhabitants, including at least 219 primary residents and more than 100 children.

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

Nearly everyone in Starbase is a renter and works at SpaceX, according to the SpaceX petition to the county judge.

Judge Trevino, the county’s top executive, told the newspaper that a legal team and elections office were studying the petition to see if it met the legal requirements.

The election can be scheduled next year if the petition gets the green light from the county’s legal department.

In his 2023 biography of Musk, Isaacson wrote that SpaceX had bought most of the units in a “fraying 1960s tract-house development” of 31 homes in the area by offering “up to three times” the assessed value.

In an apparent nod to Musk’s status as both owner and a superposter on the popular social media platform X, one of the roads in the sparsely populated area is called Memes Street.

Musk himself rents from SpaceX a small two-bedroom unit in the proposed town of Starbase. The main room in his house is a living room, dining area and kitchen, all rolled into one.

A shed in the backyard is sometimes used by his spouse as a studio or by his mother as a bedroom.

“Humble does not begin to describe its status as the primary residence of a billionaire. But Musk found it to be a haven,” wrote Isaacson.