Elon Musk is creating his own Texas Town. Hundreds already live there

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.

He 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 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 towards incorporating a town, gathering signatures and filing an official petition to hold an election.

If authorised by Cameron 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.

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.

The town would be about 3.9 square kilometres.

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

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.

He is the one who must approve the petition if it meets all of the legal requirements. NYTIMES