Welcome to Elontown, USA: an unlikely Texas home base for Musk’s business empire

People who live in the 12,000-person town, home to 131 nationally registered historical sites, describe it as a rare preserve of Old Texas—a hunk of land that has managed to stay outside of Austin’s grip and sprawling growth.

But that’s changing, say the old-timers: Home prices are rising; ranchland and open fields are being replaced by gravel pits. And it’s getting harder to find a parking spot at the only grocery store in town. The crowds are starting to skew younger. There’s more live country music in the restaurants. And in this year’s election, some “Kamala/Walz” yard signs popped up downtown alongside the “Trump/Vance” ones.

And then there’s Elon Musk.

The world’s richest person has made a growing homestead for his various businesses in Bastrop County. Starlink, a division of Musk’s SpaceX that makes internet satellites, has a 500,000-square-foot manufacturing facility just 15 minutes away from Bastrop’s historic downtown. Musk’s tunneling venture, the Boring Company, has a research and development center, and social media site X (born in San Francisco as Twitter), will soon break ground on its headquarters here.

Since moving into the area three years ago, Musk’s companies have become some of the largest employers in what has long been considered a commuter town, and signs of Musk-ification are spreading. Boring Company employees wearing “Tunnel Mars” T-shirts stroll past pickleball courts at Hyperloop Plaza. Inside the plaza’s hangar-like structure, housing high-end general store the Boring Bodega, a pub, and even a barber, vintage Musk memorabilia (like the $500 flamethrower the Boring Company once sold as a lark) are on display. And classes at Ad Astra, a Musk-owned Montessori school whose name alludes to the SpaceX founder’s dream of interplanetary travel, are expected to begin soon.

“I’ve been saying for months that it’s like a flying saucer landed…and a bunch of people got out,” Kay Rogers, an attorney in Bastrop, told me as we drove around the county in her car in March.

Questions remain, including how many Musk employees will actually move to Bastrop, what exactly Musk’s grand plan (if any) is for the area, and what to expect from a larger-than-life character as famous for entrepreneurial success as for impulsive behavior and disregard for certain rules. SpaceX, the Boring Company, X, and Ad Astra did not respond to requests for comment.

With Austin continuing to skyrocket as a tech hub, Bastrop was facing a population boom even before Elon started building here. But the Musk factor has thrown a wild card into what might otherwise have followed the typical storyline of modern urbanization. Now, mixed in with concerns about population growth, noise, and traffic is a knot of excitement, wonder, suspicion, and apprehension about what’s to come.

“I had people call and say, ‘Congratulations on this,’” Becki Womble, president and CEO of Bastrop’s Chamber of Commerce, says about X’s forthcoming headquarters.

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There’s chatter about new jobs and bigger tips being dropped at restaurants, but there’s also anxiety about affordability for non-techies, frustration about transparency, and concerns over the impact to the surroundings from Musk’s companies (one of which has already dug a tunnel under Bastrop’s farm-to-market road).

“I’m hoping and praying that he takes care of the environment,” longtime resident Tracy Hipe, who owns an organic tree farm with her husband near some of Musk’s facilities, tells me as we sit in a coffee shop. “Our little tree farm depends on that water, and he’s right on the river.”

Musk himself does not appear to visit the town very often: Locals and city officials say they’ve yet to cross paths with him. But no one fails to take note of the Tesla Cybertrucks charging up at the Buc-ee’s gas station or parked in their neighbors’ driveways.

More Teslas will almost certainly be coming. At 888 square miles, Bastrop County is big enough to fit approximately 19 San Franciscos in its boundaries. What could go wrong?

“Time is money”

When Mel Hamner, the commissioner of Bastrop County’s Precinct 1, arrived at work one morning in 2021, a visitor was waiting outside his door in one of the dark hallways of Bastrop County’s old courthouse.

The visitor demanded to know why Hamner’s office had not yet approved an application for a septic tank variance. The application was for the Boring Company, whose facilities were beyond the reach of the city’s wastewater line, and Steve Davis, the Boring Company president and one of Elon Musk’s right-hand men, had personally come for answers.

Hamner, a no-B.S. Air Force veteran with a snow-white beard who opted not to run for reelection in November, recalls the encounter as indicative of the Musk enterprises’ modus operandi.

“Their culture is ‘Time is money,’” Hamner tells me. “They don’t let the grass grow under their feet.”

The pace at which Musk’s companies move is perhaps their most defining trait to many local observers, who swear that the cars even drive faster in the parts of town frequented by Musk employees. SpaceX is already adding another 700,000 square feet to the Starlink building that went up in 2023, and county planning documents suggest more than 1,000 new parking spaces will be added. Hamner expects the new X headquarters, which he believes will be about “four to five” stories, to be up before long. “At the speed that they go? This time next year, or mid-next year, it wouldn’t surprise me to see a building there,” he says.

The frenzy of activity is having a knock-on effect, drawing new retail and residential development projects.

“With everything that’s coming in under Elon’s umbrella, the pace of development overall has gotten more aggressive—because now there’s increased competition,” says David Renfro, the lead development manager of Adelton, a master-planned neighborhood west of downtown Bastrop. “Elon provided an explosive burst to the makeup of Bastrop and what we’re going to see over the next 20 years.”

Indeed, of the 27 development projects underway in Hamner’s precinct, only three are affiliated with Musk.

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“Our master plans are all going through rewrites,” says Bastrop’s city manager, Sylvia Carrillo, who has projected that 42% more people will pour into the city in the next five years. The population of the broader county, which was 97,216 at the last official tally in 2020, is projected to nearly double by 2050.

Bastrop’s first Chipotle restaurant is under construction, and regional banks such as San Antonio-based Frost Bank and Henderson, Texas-based VeraBank are opening their first branches. Musk employees are attractive customers. “It’s certainly a growing component of our customer mix,” says Rick Womble, executive vice president and president of Roscoe Bank’s Bastrop branch (and, I later learn, husband of Becki, from the Chamber of Commerce). “We would, of course, like to see that increase,” he adds.

Liana Walker, a Bastrop real estate agent, met with more than 100 X employees this summer at one of X’s offices in Austin. The staffers, part of X’s trust and safety group, will be relocating to the company’s Bastrop headquarters, and Walker was there to pitch them on the merits of living in Bastrop instead of just punching in for work. To help make the case, she had boxes full of Bastrop-themed notepads and stickers, guides to the town, and raffle baskets of items from local businesses, including med-spa gift cards and oil-change vouchers.

Walker and her husband have already helped a handful of SpaceX, Tesla, and X employees find homes in the area—some of whom have since become friends.

But others aren’t feeling the neighborly vibes.

“They’re not making any effort”

Outside an empty film production studio one evening in March, dozens of residents from Bastrop County’s six primary towns—which include Utley, Elgin, and Bastrop—piled tender slices of brisket and slatherings of barbecue sauce onto white bread as they discussed how their community was changing.

Chap Ambrose, a cowboy-hat-donning software developer who lives up a dirt road next to the Boring Company’s facility, had towed his grill and served dinner before the main event: an informational meeting with the Texas environmental regulator and a representative from a rock-crushing company.

Technically, the meeting was about an air permit for the company to mine in the area. In reality, the crowd of farmers, neighbors, nonprofit workers, and activists had been stirred to action because of the Boring Company, which had already been cited for violations including stormwater erosion and discharging oily water, both of which have been resolved.

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“I want to be clear—we’re not opposed to economic growth and even aggregate mining. You can’t have one without the other, but what we’re opposed to is when the basic rules and best practices aren’t followed,” Skip Connett, who runs a nearby organic community farm with his wife, said at the meeting. “The Boring Company—when they came here—they failed to get an air permit like you are trying to get.”

Concerns about the Boring Company’s operations in Bastrop were inflamed in 2022 when it applied to dump nearly 143,000 gallons of treated wastewater each day into the Colorado River, and, according to some locals, did not engage with the public in a hearing about the matter. Some didn’t trust Boring to follow the rules and keep the water clean—particularly because it had been fined for dumping industrial stormwater without a permit in Bastrop.

A local environmental group set up a website and wrote a letter to the environmental agency over their concerns about wastewater damaging the Colorado River—a key outdoor centerpiece and tourist attraction for the town of Bastrop; they demanded a hearing.

Ultimately, Boring and SpaceX inked a deal with the City of Bastrop to extend a wastewater line to their operations, with a local utility company and SpaceX sharing the cost.

Still, some members of the community felt sidelined by the ordeal, according to Cheryl Lee, a member of the Bastrop City Council, noting complaints she heard that Boring’s representative didn’t adequately answer questions at the environment meeting about wastewater. “I don’t see where they have engaged,” Lee says. “They’re not making any effort to connect to the community.”

Hipe, of the tree farm, says what happens to the Colorado River as Musk moves in is top of mind: “That’s the biggest concern—because that affects a lot of people.”

A Texas empire

Bastrop’s trio of Musk companies represents just a sliver of an interconnected and ever-expanding constellation of businesses that includes $1 trillion carmaker Tesla (of which Musk is the CEO); the Tesla-owned solar energy business SolarCity; brain-chip implant company Neuralink; AI developer xAI; and the education organization X Foundation.

Some are nearby. You can drive north from Hyperloop Plaza for about 20 minutes to the facility where Neuralink is developing its brain-computer interface. Half an hour north of the plaza is Tesla’s 10-million-square-foot gigafactory, which manufactures the Cybertruck and Tesla Model Y.

But if Musk has a blueprint to turn Bastrop into a 21st-century company town, he has not revealed it.

A Wall Street Journal feature from 2023 had suggested Musk wanted to build his own town in a corner of Bastrop County. But no plans that grand seem to be underway. While there are more than a dozen little homes on the Boring Company R&D property in a little community called Snailbrook, plans drawn up a couple of years ago to build a new neighborhood with more than 100 homes have been replaced with a new, scaled-down version called Snailbrook 2 that will include 21 two-and three-bedroom houses near Hyperloop Plaza, according to property records. Neighbors noticed Boring had begun digging holes for this project in November.

Even city and county officials don’t know how many Musk employees will ultimately come to Bastrop. Job ads offer only a rough indication.

SpaceX’s website lists more than 140 open jobs based out of Bastrop, roles ranging from architectural project managers, technicians, and antenna engineers to construction managers and cooks. The Boring Company has 44 open positions—for geotechnical engineers, technicians, and buyers. Sixteen children are expected to attend Musk’s Ad Astra school in Bastrop, which he is funding through a nonprofit organization, according to documents. And four faculty members have been brought on staff, according to materials filed with Texas Health and Human Services.

With no centralized message coming from Musk Inc., and no one emissary of his business empire to liaise with the community, residents are left to guess—and worry—about how their hometown fits into the multibillionaire’s plans.

“I don’t think there’s a veil of secrecy around what’s going on at all, but I do think that there’s a general hunger to know more and to understand more—maybe what those plans might entail and how that might impact us going forward,” says Womble of Roscoe Bank.

While locals are excited for the new jobs, for example, there’s concern that some of these new homes and developments are out of budget for locals whose salaries ($48,774 on average in 2022, according to county data) can’t compete with those of Musk’s engineers—and that the increase in taxes as property values rise is forcing locals to sell their homes and downsize. Zillow data shows that the median price of a home in Bastrop County has risen to $372,500 in 2023, up from $350,000 in 2021 when the Boring Company arrived.

More and more RV or trailer parks are popping up around town as a lower-cost option for construction workers, retirees, and retail and service workers.

The developers are “bringing affordable housing for people from [Austin] that live over here—[not] the people that have lived here all their lives and have normal jobs,” Commissioner Hamner says, noting he is seeing younger people who are trying to get started being pushed into the trailer parks and RV communities, because they either can’t afford to buy a new home anymore, or can’t afford to pay the higher taxes on the home they already own.

“What about our box-store employees… How can they afford a house in this economy? They live in RVs and in [trailer] parks, and that’s sad,” he says.

“He doesn’t bother me”

Bettie Buchanan, who has owned an RV park on the Colorado River, just north of the Starlink facility, for the past 18 years, echoes some of her neighbors’ apprehension about the changing times. “The taxes on this park have gone way up. The houses have gone way up. It’s just ridiculous,” she says.

But Buchanan, who is 77 and whose great-grandfather used to own the farmland where Musk’s companies now sit, says that “whoever’s got the money can buy what they want.” She added: “I know there’s some people that have complained about Elon Musk, but as far as I know, he doesn’t bother me, and I don’t bother him.”

When I visited Bastrop for the second time in mid-September, there was a lot going on. The local history museum was recovering from a small flood that had damaged some of its collection, and there was chatter about plans for a 546-acre studio center opening in 2025 to produce Westerns and other films. The city was also reeling from a scandal with its mayor, who had an affair with the head of the city’s tourism nonprofit and was accused of interfering in an investigation over misuse of city funds. (The mayor’s attorney said no public funds were ever misused and the mayor “did not attempt to cover up anything about the public’s business…He has publicly admitted and apologized for the affair.”)

What about Musk? He had yet to be seen in town by anyone I spoke to. But the ambivalence in the air about his presence was palpable.

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SpaceX is one of the largest paying members at the Bastrop Chamber of Commerce, and X set up a meeting with the group in early October, according to Chamber of Commerce CEO Womble. Hipe says her friends love taking their kids to Hyperloop Plaza. “You can play pickleball for $1 an hour,” she says. And Hamner says that SpaceX has offered some of its land to a county organization to be used for soccer fields if they put fields and concession stands on it. What’s more, none of Musk’s companies have asked for any tax abatements—which is rather unusual, he adds.

For many locals, Bastrop will always be much more than Musk. But there’s a recognition that it will never be the same. While I was waiting to meet Hamner outside his office, I overheard him on a phone call, discussing some new Musk development projects.

“Our quiet neighborhood is gone,” he said flatly.

This article appears in the December 2024/January 2025 issue of Fortune.