Many of the tech bros who swing by Found Fine Art in Bastrop, Texas, are smitten with “Schoolgirl Witchblade,” a bronze statuette of a manga-style character with pigtails, a barely there bodice and a clawed hand ready for a supernatural brawl (price: $US3200). The preference seems on-brand.
These bros work for SpaceX, the reusable rocket and internet satellite megacorporation led by Elon Musk, who created a sexy, pigtailed, manga-style digital girlfriend for premium users of his Grok chatbot.
“They ask a lot about these,” said Alexandria Lagos, a gallery sales associate, pointing to “Schoolgirl” and similar works. “Though I haven’t seen anyone buy one.”
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.“Schoolgirl Witchblade” by Clayburn Moore, at Found Fine Art in Bastrop, Texas,. Credit: Montinique Monroe/NYT
That could change. On Friday, SpaceX raised $US75 billion in the largest initial public offering in history. The company employs 1600 people near Bastrop, which means that a sizeable chunk of the town’s 14,000 residents just got rich or at least richer.
On Thursday, the gallery’s owner, Jamie Howard, wore a look of subdued delight, as if she were waiting for a piñata to get whacked and the candy to drop on the floor.
“I definitely have clients who plan to celebrate by investing in various things,” she said with a smile. “Once they cash out their shares, there is going to be some delightful fallout around here.”
The bounty has been five years in the making. Musk started buying land in Bastrop and Travis counties, near Austin, in 2021, using about a dozen different private companies to snap up more than 1000 acres.
His tunnelling enterprise, The Boring Co., opened here first, and Starlink, part of SpaceX, opened an operational plant two years later. The companies — plus social platform X and a fledging residential community — form a compound on about 600 acres located 10 miles northwest of downtown Bastrop, known to locals as “Elon Land”.
Soon after the stock market closed Friday, Elon Land was briefly a scene of pure jubilation.
The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s tunneling enterprise. Credit: Montinique Monroe/NYT
Ten SpaceX employees, dressed in jeans and black T-shirts with YOLO printed on them in large letters, gathered to celebrate at the Boring Bodega, a warehouse-sized convenience store, bar and hair salon next to The Boring Co. and across the street from SpaceX.
They were bubbling about their windfall. A woman announced she was ready to buy a Jeep she’d been eyeing for years. A man discussed plans to borrow against the money he now had in shares that would be locked up for a period.
The Boring Bodega, a gathering spot with a convenience store and bar across from the SpaceX building. Credit: Montinique Monroe/NYT
The party moved outside to a grassy lawn, where everyone grabbed bottles of sparkling wine, shook them up and doused each other, hooting like they’d just won the Super Bowl. They would drive off and head to Austin for more toasts that night.
The revellers declined to talk to me, explaining that they were not allowed to speak to the media.
The scene would have been unfathomable six years ago, when the area’s most significant employers included a rendering plant for pet food and companies that dug up and sold dirt.
Not that Bastrop was a backwater, pre-Musk. Founded in 1832, when Texas was still part of Mexico, it has a charming downtown of late 1800s-era brick buildings, one of which is an opera house.
Around the corner, there’s the Bastrop County Museum and Visitor Centre, where you can hear a highly sanitised biography of the Baron de Bastrop, the man for whom the city is named.
People walk along North Main Street in downtown in Bastrop, Texas. Credit: Montinique Monroe/NYT
More than a few residents described him as a “bit of a con man.” He wasn’t a baron, for starters, and he fled the Netherlands after he was accused of embezzling tax funds.
Mr Musk has said he was drawn to Texas because of its business-friendly approach to regulation. He built his SpaceX headquarters and main production and rocket-testing site, Starbase, as a newly incorporated corporate town near Brownsville on the US-Mexico border. But Bastrop, just 30 miles southeast of Austin and not far from the city’s international airport, became a hub for orbital hardware manufacturing. The more Musk built, the more people poured in. Today, the “Population 7,000” sign on the way into town is badly in need of an update.
The centre of gravity is the 1.1 million-square-foot SpaceX plant, which on a recent sweltering afternoon seemed to shimmer ominously in the heat. White and black, a few city blocks wide and tapered at both ends, it looks like an extraterrestrial vessel about to disgorge aliens whose intentions are unclear.
A SpaceX building at the centre of what Bastrop locals call “Elon Land”. Credit: Jordan Vonderhaar/Bloomberg
Few people have ever laid eyes on the Willy Wonka of this vast factory. Musk is a figure of legend, like a yeti. One woman said she had a friend who years ago spotted him in a local H-E-B, a Texas supermarket chain. Lagos, the gallery employee, used to work for X and said she once saw him at a distance.
His impact, by contrast, is palpable. Beyond the dense little downtown, Bastrop — it’s pronounced “bass-drop” — is rolling pine forests and rural farmland mixed with sprawling subdivisions.
Judah Ross, a real estate agent, drove me around, pointing out new retail and restaurants, including chains such as Chuy’s and Texas Roadhouse, as well as homes that doubled in value “almost overnight” when Mr Musk turned up.
A few hit the $US1 million mark for the first time. There was also a boom in a high-end development called the Colony, where sales of $600,000 homes are now pretty common. Del Webb, a developer of communities for people over 55, opened a location in Bastrop this year.
“A lot of, like, older couples moving out here,” Mr Ross said. “Oftentimes their kids or grandkids are coming here to work for SpaceX, and so the parents want to follow along to be nearby.”
Children attend the Bastrop Splash Bash at Fisherman’s Park. Credit: Montinique Monroe/NYT
Much of this growth can be attributed to non-Musk factors, including low interest rates circa 2021 as well as COVID and the rise of remote work. Bastrop had the advantage of proximity to the red-hot Austin market. Other Texas towns near major cities — Fulshear, for example, which is not far from Houston — have grown just as fast or faster.
What sets Bastrop apart is its demographic mix. As several women here approvingly noted, there are now a lot more single men in their 30s at area bars and restaurants. (Another woman said the city was desperately in need of interior designers.) Less happily, there’s traffic. Trips that once took 20 minutes now take 40 minutes if you dare to hit the road near rush hour.
For longtime Bastrop residents, the Musk Effect has been greeted with a combination of tentative appreciation and nothing-to-do-about-it shrugs.
John Kirkland, a member of the Bastrop City Council. Credit: Montinique Monroe/NYT
John Kirkland is a Bastrop City Council member and also mayor pro tem — the “back up mayor,” as he put it. Over lunch, he noted that the state of Texas provided few tools to constrain or block Mr Musk. Elon Land is in Bastrop County but outside Bastrop’s city limits. An agreement about how to handle wastewater is the only deal that the city has with the entire Musk complex.
“None of us wants growth, but we can’t stop it,” Mr Kirkland said. “As long as he isn’t breaking the law, he is allowed to build.”
At the Copper Shot Distillery, a handful of longtime Bastropians who regularly meet up on Thursday nights said they grasped the benefits of Mr Musk’s corporate presence, but they had some complaints.
In 2024, The Boring Co. was fined a mere $11,876 for environmental violations in its Bastrop-area site. That hardly amounts to a tap on the shoulder, let alone a slap on the wrist, and locals were furious. Cheryl Green, one of the Thursday-night gatherers, wondered why the planet’s first trillionaire wouldn’t pony up a few bucks for something in the city.
“How about a YMCA?” she said, plaintively. “But I don’t think he’s known for that kind of thing.”
Mr Musk has far grander construction in mind. Last week he announced plans for an 11 million-square-foot factory to build data centres that would operate in space.
More quietly, an array of developers have been devising plans of their own. Joshua Bingaman, a real estate broker, said that last week he fielded a handful of calls from developers seeking parcels for sale near downtown.
Ready or not, he predicted that Bastrop would eventually get a men’s fashion boutique, a spot for coffee connoisseurs and a high-end cocktail bar. And that’s just the beginning.
“I don’t think people here have any idea of what’s coming,” Mr Bingaman said. “There’s going to be a tidal wave.”
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