Saturday’s Russian-looking “vote” of SpaceX employees to incorporate Starbase, Texas as a public government might seem like a grand victory for the discredited and disliked Elon Musk. With 212 votes for and only 6 against, the company town’s creation appears to cement SpaceX’s destruction of local environmental regulations for their rocket launch facility. The company bought 90% of the local real estate, and all the “elected” officials are current or former SpaceX employees appointed by the CEO.

But in the cavalier rush to consolidate power and ignore communities, SpaceX may have unwittingly introduced vulnerabilities that could eventually undermine their desire for absolute unrepresentative control.

By transforming their private facility into a public municipality, they’ve opened new avenues for change through Texas municipal law—potentially repeating the pattern that has led to the downfall of every single American company town in history.

Look at the prior art to understand the collapse or transformation beyond a controlling company’s original vision of private profit leading to public control.

1. Distributed Power Still Finds a Way: The Pullman Strike of 1894 demonstrated how company towns can backfire spectacularly. When George Pullman cruelly cut wages and refused to lower rents in his model town, company residents revolted in what became one of America’s most significant public rights protests. A company town on strike eventually involved 250,000 people across 27 states only suppressed with federal military intervention.
2. Monarchs Can’t See What’s Coming Until Late: Company towns face a fundamental contradiction—paternalistic control cannot coexist indefinitely with democratic municipal governance. As Starbase must now hold public elections, maintain public records, and follow Texas municipal law, opportunities for democratic participation emerge that weren’t available in a purely private corporate setting.
3. Adjacent Development Means Power Will Recenter: As was seen in historic company towns, development in surrounding areas inherently creates competing economic and political power that will outperform SpaceX myopic tyranny. Texas law specifically provides multiple pathways for strategic land acquisition and development adjacent to municipalities, especially undemocratic ones.
4. Economic Prosperity Undermines Company Control: Over time, successful towns inevitably attract other businesses and residents with better interests. Should Starbase genuinely grow into a “world-class place to live” that SpaceX PR claims, that growth necessarily makes SpaceX’s narrow local corporate goals look worse and worse, holding back the better more “worldly” residents.

With these historic lessons in mind it seems only appropriate to point out the incorporation plan exposes specific vulnerabilities:

1. Public Records and Transparency Requirements: As a municipality, Starbase must now comply with Texas open records laws, making previously private corporate decisions subject to public scrutiny.
2. Municipal Utility District Opportunities: Texas law allows for the creation of Municipal Utility Districts (MUDs) that could serve as simple beachheads for labor-friendly development surrounding and pushing hard into Starbase.
3. Election Cycles: While SpaceX employees currently stacked the voter rolls like they hate democracy, municipal elections occur regularly and operate under different rules than corporate governance, potentially allowing organized groups to gain representation without detection.
4. Legal Challenges Through Public Processes: Municipalities must follow procedural requirements that can be challenged through legal means, unlike private corporate decisions.

Let’s face it, Elon Musk keeps running anti-patterns. He clearly thinks Hitler should have won WWII. And now he’s showing how a push into company towns also could repeat the wrong side of history.

Every major company town in American history—from Pullman to Hershey to coal mining communities—eventually faced a reckoning with people exposing the patently unfair and soul crushing designs. The American government protection of workers’ rights to unionize spelled the end of purely company-controlled towns, which surely has to do why Musk thinks he will replay the past to prove a different result. Even Hershey, considered one of the most benevolent company towns, faced a significant strike for rights in 1937.

SpaceX’s corporate control currently seems absolute and tyrannical in mind, but the legal structure of Texas municipalities expands their target surface with pathways for change that wouldn’t have existed without incorporation. The company may have unwittingly traded short-term benefits (streamlined approvals for environmental destruction, closure authority to deny local children access to beaches) for long-term vulnerabilities inherent to public governance structures.

For now, Starbase represents a bold experiment in Elon Musk pushing fascism into American government – but if history is any guide, its long-term fate may be a lesson we have learned repeatedly already.