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A lot has changed since the first brick was laid in Elon Musk’s new company town. In March 2023, the multibillionaire CEO mapped out plans to build his own “Texas utopia,” where his employees can live and work, situated in close proximity to the facilities for Musk’s the Boring Company, an infrastructure- and tunnel-construction company, and SpaceX, which develops space technology. Snailbrook, named after the Boring Company’s mollusk mascot, is Musk’s corporate-built subdivision. It sits on part of thousands of acres of newly acquired farmland in Texas's Bastrop County, about an hour southeast of Austin.
In the two years since construction got underway, the world’s richest person has transformed Twitter into a bot-filled MAGA-verse known as X and uprooted X and SpaceX headquarters to Texas, after having long denounced the “overregulation, overlitigation, and overtaxation” of California state law. Most notably, Musk has also forged an uncomfortably close relationship with President Donald Trump, enough to secure him a position in government in the specially created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, the acronym a reference to the cryptocurrency Musk promotes.
Staffed by a small team of Musk allies and senior employees poached from his private companies, DOGE, an unofficial department, has already exercised a great deal of power. In the first three months that followed Trump’s inauguration, about 216,670 layoffs were attributed to DOGE directives, including the abrupt firing of federal workers and contractors and the cancellation of government contracts.
According to The Guardian, DOGE has been blocked from accessing Social Security records, but it has acquired access to citizens' private data at the Treasury and education departments, as Wired has reported. With Musk’s power coalescing over policy, social media, and the sway of public opinion, should we be worried about the control he has in creating his own corporate town?
America has a long, knotty history with company towns. Often, but not always, built on noble aims, they tend to reveal themselves over time as either worker-centric havens or pseudo-feudal, capitalist hellscapes. At best, they can offer walkable neighborhoods and new-build housing with subsidized rents and dedicated amenities designed to enrich the well-being of workers and attract skilled labor to remote areas, following the tradition of corporate paternalism. At worst, they bear enormous potential to erode the interests of workers and cultivate a dynamic of extreme dependence.
The very nature of this type of arrangement could mean employees become directly reliant on their boss for housing, income, and access to health care, rendering them more vulnerable to risk, precarity, and exploitation. When your boss is also your landlord, your bank, your doctor, and in some cases, local government and police, union power is often stifled and the capacity for surveillance is chilling.
On the face of things, Musk’s intentions seem fairly benign. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, “Project Amazing” proposes the development of 110 single-family homes, offered at below-market rents to Musk’s Austin-area employees. Starting at $800 per month for a two- or three- bedroom home, they cost a fraction of the $1,925 median rent in Bastrop, so it’s easy to see why workers would be inclined to reside in this type of employer-owned subdivision. Throw in the promise of shiny, state-of-the-art leisure facilities and a school at your doorstep and it might start to look as if the prospect for work-life balance could finally be attainable.
The rent might be cheap at Snailbrook, but reports paint a more precarious picture. In 2023, anonymous sources “familiar with the project” told the Journal that, if an employee leaves or is fired, they’d be required to vacate the property within 30 days.
As it stands, the reality of Musk’s promised land is a little womp, womp. Sherwood News, the publication operated by stock-trading company Robinhood, reported in September that the town, so far, consisted of about 15 modular homes, a swimming pool, playground, and a gym. Not far from the residential plots sits the commercial center, Hyperloop Plaza, with its Boring Bodega, hair salon, pub, entertainment area, candy store, and outdoor pickle-ball court, according to the publication.
Teen Vogue has reached out to the Boring Company for comment.
That might not be so bad if it weren’t for the feeling that much of the town has been cobbled together in a hurry, as another report from Sherwood News suggested. A visiting reporter said the children’s playground included broken equipment, constructed from improper residential-grade materials, and was without any shade from the sun, leaving the grounds and users ill-equipped for Bastrop’s blistering summers.
The Montessori School that local NBC station KXAN reported was initially billed to admit 50 students has been restricted to an intake of 24, due to the fact that it wasn’t resourced with a big enough well. It will start with only 16 students, according to local ABC News affiliate KVUE. Local reporting also seems to suggest that Snailbrook is still set to expand, but development is currently stalled until a deal is made to connect it to the area's local wastewater line, according to Bastrop's city manager.
It’s not just the execution that's leaving some locals feeling apprehensive, but the reported lack of transparency and steamrolling of projects without sufficient consultation. After all, the Journal reported, in 2020, Musk is said to have sought assurances from Steve Adler, then mayor of Austin, that government bureaucracy wouldn’t hinder his progress. Executives at Musk’s companies have even explored incorporating the town, which would grant the CEO greater power to set some of his own regulations and accelerate his plans.
One major complaint lodged by nearby residents is the perception that companies involved in Snailbrook are displaying a worrying disregard for the local environment. Since May 2022, SpaceX and Boring Co. have received at least 13 violations from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which, the Houston Chronicle reported, resulted in fines due to the discharge of concrete-truck wash-out water without authorization and the failure to control erosion and sediment to minimize pollutants. But the fact is, five-figure fines are small change to a man who makes almost $1,000 per second.
One Bastrop resident, Chap Ambrose, has taken matters into his own hands, reporting on violations and publishing plans and public records via his YouTube channel, Keep Bastrop Boring — a play on the Texas capital’s slogan, “Keep Austin Weird.” One of Ambrose's videos concerns the Boring Company’s application for a permit to dump 143,000 gallons of wastewater each day into the Colorado River, while another cites an “approach of secrecy” and attempts to silence locals via nondisclosure agreements. “It seems to me that they only follow the rules and behave when they’re being watched,” Ambrose said, relaying the frustration that the companies “refuse to follow the very minimal restrictions” required for development in Texas.
For now it remains to be seen whether Snailbrook fulfills its promise or becomes a fool’s paradise. Regardless of the consequences, though, its creation poses a greater question about how much power the ultra-rich ought to have over how we work, learn, and live.
