A few years back, a contractor doing some renovation work for my in-laws told a strange story. He claimed he had been called out to meet the representative of a businessman who wanted to build some houses near Bastrop, 30 miles south of Austin. As he was discussing the project details, he sensed that somebody was standing behind him. When he turned around, he saw the richest man in the world.
As far as Texas tall tales go, it was almost perfect, and yet I thought it was probably true. This was back when Elon Musk was just starting to move his companies out of California; long before he went all in on Trump and became the Great Satan of progressive demonology. The contractor turned the job down. He told my in-laws he preferred to do business with his neighbours, but I am quite certain that the real reason was because he knew his work was shit, and that Musk’s lawyers would have fed him through a woodchipper.
Since then, Musk’s presence in Texas, and Bastrop in particular, has only grown. Both X and The Boring Company, his tunnel-building company, are headquartered there, directly across the road from “Project Echo”, a 500,000-square-foot building that SpaceX uses to manufacture Starlink terminals. In 2023, the Wall Street Journal raised eyebrows when it reported that Musk was planning to add a "Texas utopia" named Snailbrook to the Bastrop complex. Then, late last year, word got out that he had secured permission to add a school with a focus on STEM subjects. All this in a town that I had, until very recently, primarily associated with the dinosaur park located on its outskirts.
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