The Road to Muskville, Texas
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 parklocated on its outskirts.
Many are the tech companies that have opened offices in the Austin area over the past two decades. But Musk’s ventures in and around Bastrop were accompanied by uniquely sensationalist coverage. His headline-grabbing attempts to take a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy had, for a time, overshadowed his activities in Texas. Yet I knew Musk’s stint in Washington would be brief. As a special government employee, he was limited to just 130 days of service — and more crucially, the damage he was doing to his companies, Tesla in particular, meant he would soon have to return to Texas to manage the fallout. And here, his influence was only set to grow.
So, what exactly was he building out there? I decided to see for myself.
***
The drive from Austin takes me through Webberville (pop. 394), a tiny town of ranch houses and barns that was already regarded as a backwater in 1903, when it lost its post office. Then, out of nowhere, a sudden turn down FM 1209 transports me into the future.
Directly ahead lies Project Echo, gleaming white in the spring sunshine, as if a vast, elongated spaceship had come down to land in a Texan cow pasture. The factory is capable of producing 90,000 million Starlink terminals a week, and Musk is still adding to its capacity.
Across the road stands “Hyperloop Plaza”, named after a transportation system first proposed by Musk in 2013 that would propel passengers along tubes in electric pods at 600 miles an hour. I park amid the Ford, GMC and Ram trucks — there are no Teslas — and investigate. Despite the futuristic sounding name, it all looks very ordinary, consisting of two metal warehouse buildings, a food truck, a kids’ playpark, a tennis court and a medical centre. One of the metal buildings is surrounded by “private property” signs, while the other, “The Boring Bodega”, is a grocery store.
Behind a tall fence stands The Boring Company building, while behind that I spot a handful of trailers — this is Snailbrook, Musk’s so-called utopian town. One day, it is projected to contain 110 family homes, but right now it looks like a barracks: you could maybe house 20 employees there.
The Boring Bodega is more than just a grocery store; it also contains a bar (“The Prufrock Pub”), a merch stand (Musk’s “Tunnel Mars” T-shirt was only available in XXXL, alas), a hairdresser’s, the Cutterhead Candy Company and The Café Monet, where employees are encouraged to relieve stress through the medium of pottery. When I arrive, the main event is young Grace’s second birthday party. Several burly dudes with beards are present, which leads me to conclude that Grace’s dad works for The Boring Company.
As I sit down to eat my lunch (grilled cheese and ham sandwich, $7.50), a bored grandad wanders away from the celebrations to make conversation with two men sitting behind me about his days in the Marines. Both of them work for The Boring Company, but only one had done military service; the other blamed his mother for his failure to participate in any of America’s wars, for he would surely have done so otherwise. Every now and then, somebody in a SpaceX T-shirt comes in and orders a cold brew. At one point, a local walks past with a baby goat in a pram.
Everything feels calm, quiet, private, as if the outside world did not exist: a company town on Mars. It’s curiously unsettling after a week of anti-Elon rage, during which a Tesla dealership had been firebombed, and irate liberals had started scratching swastikas into Cybertrucks, as if mere ownership of a Musk vehicle was a sign that you loved fascism.
“Do you get a lot of visitors?” I ask the woman behind the counter.
“During the week, yes. But on the weekends, it’s mainly employees and their families.”
“What about Elon haters? Do any of them ever come out here?”
Her eyes light up: “Oh yes.”
I press for details. “What do they do?”
I can’t imagine they get violent because the employees of The Boring Company look like they know how to handle themselves. “Nothing too extreme, I hope?”
After a pause, her eyes dart to the customer behind me. Details are not forthcoming. I take my Moon Cheese and leave.
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Published in Dispatch May 13th 2025