Elon Musk’s Starbase Town Likely to be Approved by Voters

Elon Musk’s company town ambitions are edging closer to reality.

Residents of Starbase, the SpaceX-anchored enclave at the town of Boca Chica near the Gulf Coast, are voting on whether to incorporate as a city, the Texas Tribune reported.

Just 279 people are eligible to cast ballots in the May 3 election, and 90 percent of them have registered since early last year, according to county records obtained by the New York Times.

Most of the voters are SpaceX employees or their relatives. That insular demographic, paired with the company’s sprawling local presence, has led many to predict an outcome in favor of incorporation.

If approved, the move would cement SpaceX’s control over a community it has already shaped through informal governance. And it will turbocharge Musk’s broader Texas footprint, which includes plans for Snailbrook, another semi-autonomous development near Austin.

Unlike Snailbrook, which is a loosely assembled residential patch near a Boring Company site, Starbase has clear ambitions for legal status.

If voters approve incorporation, Starbase will become a Type C municipality, electing a mayor and two commissioners tasked with creating the city from scratch.

That includes deciding on services like fire and police, budgeting tax revenue and managing the area’s civil infrastructure, most of which SpaceX already oversees informally through agreements with Cameron County.

The company’s pitch? Incorporation will “streamline” development and give it more control over civil functions like utilities and zoning. Musk has already funneled investment into the area, building a $100 million office and factory, a $15 million shopping center and schools and clinics for SpaceX employees.

It’s an escalation of the model Musk’s companies have toyed with in other parts of the state.

Musk owns over 900 acres in Boca Chica and Port Isabel, and another 2,500 acres in Central Texas, where he’s developing a quasi-private community wrapped around Tesla’s Gigafactory and a proposed Neuralink office. But in South Texas, formal city status would give him the legal tools to regulate road closures for rocket launches, adopt development-friendly rules and even exercise eminent domain.

The vote, at the billionaire’s bidding, will offer one of the clearest glimpses yet of how the rocket company’s next phase of evolution into a land-controlling civic force shakes out.

Critics say Starbase is just the latest example of Musk’s penchant for molding public processes into corporate ones. Proponents argue the city’s creation could be a model for future spaceport cities.

— Judah Duke