Elon Musk Wins Vote To Make SpaceX Site Into Its Own City

Elon Musk, the richest person on Earth, is set to have his own microcity in South Texas after winning a local vote on Saturday, mainly made up of people who work for him and their families.

Starbase, the new city built around the billionaire’s company SpaceX, is located in a coastal southern town in Texas close to the Mexico border and covers only about one and a half square miles.

Musk spent the weekend celebrating the vote on X, the social media site he owns, writing that Starbase is “now a real city!” and sharing photos of him opening the company’s launch site over a decade ago.

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It’s been a long wish for Musk, who posted in March of 2021 that he was “creating” Starbase. It became a reality when nearly all voters, 212 to 6, opted to incorporate the city. According to The Texas Newsroom, the majority of eligible voters worked for Musk. Many others are family members of SpaceX employees. Next, to cement Starbase, Texas, a judge must issue an order declaring the election results and the official incorporation of the new city.

Boca Chica Village, a small beach town founded over 80 years ago, sits on the Starbase compound. In recent years, it’s experienced a seismic shift. SpaceX, The Texas Newsroom reports, has bought up almost all the houses in the area, adding Airstream trailers and tiny homes for its employees. According to SpaceX officials, in the proposed boundaries of Starbase, only 10 out of 247 lots aren’t owned by Musk’s company or its employees.

“We need the ability to grow Starbase as a community,” Starbase General Manager Kathryn Lueders wrote in a request to local officials in 2024 aimed at getting a vote on the city onto the ballot.

In addition to Musk’s control over the company, Starbase is expected to be overseen by three people with longstanding connections with SpaceX, all of whom ran unopposed and without much electoral flair.

The Texas Tribune, along with the nonprofit Sunlight Research Center, reviewed the three candidates’ public records and social media to understand who will govern the newly designated area.

“There have been no signs of a traditional campaign along the Boca Chica Beach region in South Texas,” the Tribune’s Berenice Garcia wrote on Friday. “No yard signs. No campaign websites. No candidate forums.”

Only one person ran for Mayor of Starbase: Robert “Bobby” Peden. Peden is in his mid-thirties, has worked for SpaceX for over a decade, and contributed $5,000 to SpaceX’s political action committee in December.

Jenna Petrzelka and Jordan Buss ran to be the two commissioners for Starbase. Petrzelka, whose husband also works at SpaceX, started at the company in 2012 and rose to manager of operations engineering at Starbase, a role she had for about a year leading up to last summer. On campaign documents, she listed herself as a “philanthropist.” In 2022, she volunteered at Good Neighbor Settlement House, a local nonprofit assisting migrants and the homeless community.

Buss, a senior director of Environmental Health and Safety for SpaceX, has worked at the company since 2023. That year, he made a $600 political contribution to the SpaceX PAC.

After Saturday’s vote to create the city of Starbase, the three candidates win automatically.

The city’s incorporation comes as both a professional and personal win for Musk, who has faced backlash from Americans across the country for his actions heading up the Department of Government Efficiency since President Donald Trump took office just over a hundred days ago.

In addition to nationwide protests against Musk at Tesla facilities and his involvement in gutting key federal funding programs, multiple polls have illustrated broad disapproval for the billionaire’s growing influence in Washington.

In a February Washington Post-Ipsos poll, 49 percent of respondents said they disapproved of the job Musk was doing within the federal government. Three other polls from February, conducted by Quinnipiac, Emerson College, and Marist Poll for NPR and PBS, all found that respondents were more likely to disapprove of Musk’s role in Trump’s administration than support it. (Republicans were more likely to approve of Musk, compared to a small number of Democrats, according to the polls.)

It’s unclear how long Musk will continue his central-facing role in Trump’s orbit, and rumors continue to pop up that his days in Washington may be coming to a close. Musk himself recently claimed that he’ll pull back from his work at DOGE to focus on running Tesla. Still, the billionaire remains deeply involved with the current administration, and the impacts of DOGE’s cuts are already being acutely felt in homes across the country and the world.

Though the vote for Starbase passed handily with support from those within Musk’s network, its creation is not without protest. The company town will now have increased power over a nearby popular beach and state park to use for rocket launches. And, a proposed bill is aimed at charging anyone who doesn’t comply with an order to evacuate the beach with a Class B misdemeanor and up to 180 days in jail. Critics feel that beach closure should stay with the county government, representing a larger population that enjoys the beach and park.

On Saturday, the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, which has opposed the new city and SpaceX’s control over the beach, held a demonstration that brought out dozens of people.

Christopher Basaldú, an SOTXEJN co-founder and a member of the Carrizo Comecrudo Nation of Texas, said his ancestors have long been in the area, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf. “It’s not just important,” he said, “it’s sacred.”