‘He’s Trying to Colonize This Community’: Inside Elon Musk’s Plan to Take Over This Texas Town

For Politico, Will McCarthy reports from the rural outskirts of unincorporated Boca Chica Village, a small South Texas community where Elon Musk is attempting to build his own city: Starbase. McCarthy vividly captures the strangeness and uncertainty of the moment with sharp details—a road off the highway that reads Mars-a-Lago, a vandalized nine-foot tall bust of Musk bearing a pink bandage over a gashed cheek. Some locals are frustrated that SpaceX has failed to deliver on its promises of jobs, opportunity, and a better future. Instead, as one environmental activist puts it, they’re witnessing “the slow colonization of her hometown by the tech oligarchy.”

To Hinojosa, the county’s decision to coddle SpaceX was a betrayal. As she sees it, the leadership that was supposed to lead the community into the future instead sold it down the river, creating high-paying jobs for tech bros shipped in from other cities — not for Brownsville residents, the overwhelming majority of whom are Latino and working class.

Today, there is no shortage of Elon Musk acolytes on the fringes of the Starbase complex. Space travel fanboys wearing SpaceX ball caps mingle with families snapping photos of the launch pad and rockets. The Musk iconography surrounding the base — his DOGE mural, the gold bust with “memelord” emblazoned at the base — feel like strange physical manifestations of internet culture planted in the vastness of the Rio Grande Valley. Even if Musk’s star is fading in Washington, his loyal fanbase still lurks in the periphery of his orbit, as far south as Cameron County.