Over the past few years, Elon Musk has expanded his footprint in Texas, moving his companies from California and building offices, warehouses and manufacturing plants across a growing number of Texas counties.

Now Musk is trying to do something that few, if any, titans of industry have done in a century: create his own company town.

Musk has long talked about his desire to make a new town — which he hopes to call Starbase — in coastal South Texas, where his rocket launch company, SpaceX, is based.

For years, the plan did not appear to be moving forward in any official way, in part because creating a new municipality in Texas requires a certain number of residents and support from a majority of voters.

But in that time, SpaceX employees have packed into newly refurbished midcentury homes and temporary housing — some of it in the form of silver Airstream trailers — in the shadow of the company’s rockets.

Then this month, company employees who live around its offices and launch site took the first major step toward incorporating a town, gathering signatures and filing an official petition to hold an election.

The petition, filed with top officials in Cameron County and shared with The New York Times based on a public records request, provides some of the first details on the size and the operation of the new city that Musk and his company are envisioning.

If authorized by the county, the election would allow voters to cast a ballot for a slate of three new city officials, including the city’s first mayor. The petition suggests that the mayor will be SpaceX’s security manager, Gunnar Milburn.

“This is a very unique situation,” said Alan Bojorquez, a lawyer in Austin who specializes in helping groups of Texas residents through the process of incorporating new towns. He said he had never helped a company that wanted its employees to form their own town.

The Starbase petition describes a community of around 500 current inhabitants, including at least 219 primary residents and more than 100 children, in an area at the very end of State Highway 4 by Boca Chica Beach, where SpaceX launches many of its rockets.

Town Is a Bit Bigger Than Central Park

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

Nearly everyone is a renter and works at SpaceX, according to the petition.

There are few examples in Texas of such company towns, though there is one north of Houston where the founder of the Texas Renaissance Festival created the town of Todd Mission and became its mayor.

And Musk may not be content with just one new town. He has already looked into the possibility of housing employees in a development outside the town of Bastrop, near Austin. The area is home to a swiftly growing campus for Musk companies, including a manufacturing plant for SpaceX; the headquarters of the Boring Co., which is creating tunneling technology; and, soon, offices for the social platform X.

It was not clear from the petition why Musk and his company were seeking to create the new town of Starbase nor what benefit they might obtain from doing so.

Bojorquez said that most new towns were created by people who live in unincorporated areas and want to prevent their area from being gobbled up by an expanding city, or to keep a particularly undesirable business from moving in.

The new town being proposed by Musk could create its own police or fire departments, or issue its own ordinances. But it would not have to.

“Cities are required by law to do very little,” Bojorquez said. One of the biggest practical issues is road maintenance, which would no longer be handled by the county.

Of course, incorporation allows communities to elect their own local leaders, and also to create municipal utility systems, such as for water. As a city, Starbase would be eligible for state and federal grants, would have certain immunity from lawsuits and could also condemn property, Bojorquez said.

In a letter filed along with the petition, Kathryn Lueders, SpaceX’s general manager for Starbase, said the company needed “the ability to grow Starbase as a community,” and noted that SpaceX “currently performs civil functions” because of its remote location, including managing utilities and providing schooling and medical care.

“Incorporation would move the management of some of these functions to a more appropriate public body,” Lueders wrote in her letter to the Cameron County judge, who is the county’s top executive and must approve the petition if it meets all of the legal requirements.

For years, SpaceX has run into local opposition in Cameron County from environmental groups over the effect of large-scale and frequent launches on the nearby protected coastal ecology. And residents and officials from Brownsville, about 20 miles away, have at times complained that launches shut down roads and cut them off from the beach.

Previously, the company had appeared interested only in having the area’s name changed for the purposes of postal delivery. An application to do so is pending before a federal agency.

“We thought that was what they were really looking for, but I guess they wanted to extend that a little further,” the county judge, Eddie Treviño Jr., said in an interview. “Obviously, they think that there’s some advantage to it.”

Treviño said the county’s legal team and elections office were studying the petition to see if it met the legal requirements. “I’m waiting to hear back from them,” he said. An election could be scheduled next year.

The proposed new mayor, Milburn, declined to comment when reached by phone Monday. So did others who signed the petition.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By J. David Goodman/Meridith Kohut
c. 2024 The New York Times Company