The revenge of the company town: Elon Musk, the new Baron of Bastrop

The Baron de Bastrop arrived in Texas with big ambitions. 

Born Philip Hendrik Nering Bögel, he left the Netherlands for what is now America in the late 1700s. While he claimed to have fled the French invasion, he actually left to avoid a trial for embezzlement of tax funds. In his new home, he gave himself the title of baron. 

“We’re not really sure where he got the name ‘Bastrop,’” said Judy Enis, a docent at the Bastrop County Historical Society Museum & Visitor Center. “He just wanted to be a baron because it sounds good.” 

He floated between countries, governments, and allegiances. He became a well-to-do entrepreneur, made inroads among politicians, and attained several positions in government himself. Most famously, using his connections with the Mexican government, the Baron de Bastrop got permission to bring American colonists to what is now Texas, where others had been denied. Because of that, the county and town of Bastrop bear his name. 

Today, there’s a new Baron of Bastrop, and the similarities are striking. An immigrant himself, he moved his businesses to Texas to avoid California’s taxes and regulation. He became fast friends with US president-elect Donald Trump and has flattered his way into a position to dramatically reshape American government. He doesn’t just call himself a CEO; he’s a “Technoking.” And he’s shepherding new residents to Texas. 

The new baron in town is Elon Musk. He has infinite money, and he’s got big plans to build his own company town and reshape Bastrop — whether the locals like it or not.

A decade ago, when Ellen Tanner’s daughter was little, the two would walk down to the Colorado River near their home in Bastrop to picnic with friends and wade into the cool water. A lot has changed since then. There’s more traffic than before. A movie studio is setting up shop. Some concrete and gravel companies have started operations. 

Oh, and the world’s richest man moved in. With bulldozers.

SpaceX and The Boring Co. now sit just 15 minutes upstream from where Tanner lives, along the river’s snaking banks, and Musk’s social-media company, X, is moving in. Locals have repeatedly raised concerns about the companies’ effect on the environment, including when Boring asked to pump over 140,000 gallons a day of treated wastewater into the Colorado River.

“Makes you think twice about wading into or swimming in the river,” said Tanner, an artist and middle-school teacher who lives in a small home just outside Bastrop’s downtown. “We won’t go there anymore.” These days, Tanner’s family swims at the pool in the state park nearby.

“When people come in with a lot of swagger and very little humility and limitless vaults of cash, it’s a little bit scary,” Tanner said. She hasn’t met Musk, nor had the two dozen other locals I spoke with in late October for this article. “I would just ask him to try to please treat the place with respect — the people here and the environment — because this is what we have. We don’t have tons of money to fall back on and move somewhere else.”

SpaceX declined to comment for this article, and Boring and X didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In true industrialist fashion, Musk, who aspires to colonize Mars, has also been building his own company town here. It’s called Snailbrook, and its plans called for an initial 110 single-family homes for his employees. Two years into the project, the town is mostly just a bodega, a smaller-than-planned school, and about 15 trailers tucked behind Boring’s facilities. When I visited, it felt like a rushed job with unfinished walls and a broken-down playground. 

Musk, who has willed mass-market electric cars and his own rocket company into existence, could certainly make Snailbrook work — unless, of course, a company town needs more than money and determination to succeed.

For now, the town and its residents are left to wait and see.

The double-edged sword of a company town

Snailbrook is only the latest iteration of a very old, very controversial American notion: the company town. Early American mining and textile operations, for example, were often located in remote areas where employers had to build homes, stores, and schools to accommodate their employees.

Invariably, company towns are also very much a monument to the man (yes, it’s usually a man) who created them. 

So goes Musk’s company town, where he’s both solving workers’ needs and burnishing his own ego. Supported by his limitless cash, self-confidence, and a legacy of success, Musk is attempting what many executives have tried — and typically failed — to do.

America has a long history of company towns that Musk and his companies can learn from, from exploitative to utopian. 

Company towns arose in the 19th century as a symptom of — and a solution to — issues related to the Industrial Revolution, as factories, mines and mills in remote locations needed infrastructure to support a workforce. Lowell, Massachusetts is considered one of the first planned company towns. It included a textile mill and boarding houses for the women who operated it along mostly undeveloped land on the Merrimack River, where overseers made sure the women went to church and behaved morally. A number of American communities that are still around to this day —  Hershey, Pennsylvania, Gary, Indiana — were founded as company towns, though few are in their original form.

On one end of the spectrum are those that sought to overly profit from their captive clients. Those are rife with tales of eviction, debt, shootouts, and arson. Things have gotten especially tenuous when the companies have tried to fight unions — something Musk has a reputation for doing — or when the economy or the business itself headed south. 

But let’s presume Musk aims to build a utopia. 

Price Fishback, an economic historian at the University of Arizona who’s written extensively on company towns, said that despite their checkered legacy, company towns are often created with good intentions.

“There are a number of towns where they did try to provide pretty good services so that they could get better workers,” he said. But it will take much more than good intentions, because when your work and your life outside work are inextricable, things get tricky. 

“It doesn’t have to be bad,” Fishback said. “Just, if things go bad, they can go really bad.”

George Pullman built Pullman, Illinois, outside Chicago in the late 1800s. There, where land was cheaper, he bought up acreage and over the course of four years transformed it into a giant showpiece for his company, himself, and his paternalistic vision.

After seeing how people responded to his company’s railroad sleeper cars, much more comfortable than the typical bone-jangling rail cars of the day, Pullman “came to believe that civilized surroundings would also have an ennobling and refining effect on his workers,” Hardy Green wrote in his book on the subject, “The Company Town.” Pullman thought that “pleasant working conditions would draw out the workers’ qualities of loyalty, honesty, and perseverance.”

From the swamp, he built state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities and comfortable homes for workers, complete with running water and gas heating. Everything was made of red brick. Pullman also built and operated a market complex, bank, theater, school, and library, erecting a total of 1,500 buildings for the town. But it wasn’t an act of love. He believed the amenities would lead to more shareholder gains.

“No one should imagine that Pullman was a do-gooder where his workers were concerned,” Green wrote. “Instead the town was a business venture, pure and simple.”

You couldn’t buy the homes, and rents were actually more expensive than comparable housing, as Pullman sought a return on that investment too. Tenants could be evicted within 10 days and company inspectors made sure workers’ “opinions and their habits were acceptable.” There was no elected government — it was run by people in the company — and no newspaper.

Despite its near monopoly on the sleeping-car industry and record earnings, Pullman’s company eventually struggled during an economic downturn, laying off workers and reducing wages. The company didn’t lower its rents, rationalizing that it couldn’t justify the lower ROI.

Workers organized and went on strike. Federal troops were called in. They ended up killing dozens of workers and jailing union leaders. Ultimately the town declined and was subsumed into greater Chicago.

Most of what we think of as company towns are part of a bygone era. They largely went away as the need for them declined thanks to a number of 20th-century developments, including more affordable homes, more social safety nets, increased wages, and rising car ownership, which meant workers weren’t as reliant on their geography for jobs. 

You could argue that modernized versions of company towns exist in mega campuses like those of Apple, Google, and Facebook. But perhaps there’s a growing need for old-school company towns once again, as homeownership is increasingly out of reach, wages stagnate, and government cuts — perhaps dictated by Musk himself — loom.

“Less weird, more wonderful”

In July, Musk announced he was moving X’s headquarters from San Francisco to Austin. It turns out, in typical Musk fashion, he exaggerated. 

Its actual location is 25 miles away in Bastrop County. It sits near Snailbrook, Boring, and SpaceX, and it’s closer to the airport than it is to Austin. It’s also near Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory. A billboard for one housing development in Bastrop reads, “Less weird, more wonderful,” a play to differentiate it from Austin’s slogan, “Keep Austin weird.” The prospective HQ is also outside the town limits of Bastrop, whose historic and steadily trafficked downtown is an additional 15-minute drive away, depending on traffic.

Bastrop County’s population has jumped 17% in the past four years, data from Placer.ai shows. That’s more than quadruple the growth of Austin’s Travis County — one of the fastest-growing areas in the country. To counter the congestion from all the commuters and construction vehicles, the county wants to widen the roads and replace stoplights with overpasses and exits.

In the first satellite image below from Planet Labs PBC, you can see how the area is laid out. The second, moving image shows Musk’s businesses transform what was pasture to a center of industry in just four years. For scale, the big white building at the top, SpaceX’s Starlink factory, is undergoing an expansion that will more than double the size of the original structure to over 1 million square feet.

To accommodate the influx of people, including the 1,400 to 1,500 directly employed at his companies, developers in Bastrop County are building dozens of housing tracts. When I visited, a bulldozer was working on erasing a hill from the landscape to make way for a new development, while construction workers wearing straw hats dotted the plains where brush used to be.

Driving from Austin to Snailbrook was once a 40-minute reverse commute. But as my rental car neared Musk’s properties, the route time on Google Maps turned red and got longer. I waited at backed-up traffic lights, staring longingly at a 70-mph speed-limit sign on State Highway 71. 

Along the route, you’ll pass a number of RV parks, fireworks stores, and every American dining and fast-food chain you can think of, much of it built in the style of a Macaroni Grill. Since we’re in Texas, there’s a preponderance of giant things used as roadside advertising: I passed a giant golf ball, a giant boot, and a giant squirrel intended to hawk pecans.

As I crested a hill near the end of the drive, SpaceX’s Starlink facility rose like a white monolith. To the right was Boring, whose metal facilities and giant tunneling equipment were obscured behind a green slatted chain-link fence. Just past the buildings were pastures with recently baled hay.

The residences that exist so far in Snailbrook are also beyond that fence — just over a dozen indistinct gray and beige trailers rented by company employees. Welcome banners with an illustration of Boring’s snail mascot hung from lampposts and provided little pops of pastel. The streets outside these homes, as well as Snailbrook’s private pool and gym, were empty midday. 

New documents submitted to Bastrop County in September show plans to build about 20 more two- and three-bedroom homes — likely more trailers — in a project called Snailbrook 2 on a nearby property. When I visited, I didn’t see evidence that construction had even begun on the more substantial part of Snailbrook, whose 110-home development in partnership with home-builder Lennar, is set for construction on an adjacent property. 

Musk himself doesn’t live in Snailbrook; he lives in Austin, where he owns three mansions within walking distance of one another for his children and their mothers.

The “Square Deal”

Endicott, New York, was founded as a company town in the early 1900s for workers of what would become the largest shoe factory in the world, the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Co. Its leader, George Johnson, had been a shoe-factory worker himself since he was 13. He espoused worker-first policies that still seem progressive today: eight-hour workdays, good pay, free healthcare, public pools and parks open to all, and homes for workers that they could purchase at cost. 

It seemed to be quite a successful company town while it lasted. At its height the company was the biggest employer in the area with tens of thousands of workers. Numerous other businesses popped up alongside it. Many workers owned their own homes. Children could visit their parents in the factories or spend their days at the town’s public attractions, including swimming pools, parks, and a number of carousels that were free to use.

To celebrate what they saw as an incredibly fair and humane relationship, the company’s workers built an arch at the entrance of the town reading “Home of the Square Deal.” 

Over the years, shoe production became automated or was sent overseas, and the company eventually disbanded. The town’s fortunes have ebbed and flowed ever since. IBM was born in Endicott, but it eventually left too. Still, to this day, many of the thousands of large and lovely homes remain and are even in the hands of descendants of the shoe factory, leaving a legacy of a business that no longer exists.

Colleen Pezzolla, a director of Endicott’s visitor center whose grandfather worked in the shoe factory, told me that Endicott, by most accounts, was a successful company town, but now, like many of its ilk, is struggling. She also said there’s new light on the horizon.

Now, politicians are trying to coax Endicott back to its previous glory, bestowing the federal designation of America’s Battery Tech Hub on the region. It even has its own (non-Tesla) gigafactory, which has risen right next to an old shoe-company tannery building, though it’s not at the scale of Musk’s Austin Gigafactory some 1,700 miles away.

“I know a few people came in for them,” Pezzolla said, referring to the battery companies, “but I haven’t seen a flood of people. You know how long that takes.”

I asked the other director, Jacqueline Tedesco, what advice she’d give Musk as he sets out to build a successful company town.

“You have to have a lot of money,” Tedesco said — which of course, Musk does. “I’m talking about the benevolency,” she clarified. “You have to give a lot of money. You have to help start people out.”

Residents of Endicott like Pezzolla and Tedesco are looking at Musk’s company town with keen interest. Since Snailbrook isn’t in Austin — or even within the city limits of Bastrop — Musk has to make up the difference for people to want to move there. 

Inside Snailbrook

So what has Musk built for his workers?

The most public-facing part of this “town,” the Hyperloop Plaza, sits just beyond Boring. So far, it consists of two industrial metal buildings, like those that typically house livestock, and a shared parking lot. The smaller building includes the Boring Bodega, a pub, a hair salon, an entertainment area, and a soon-to-open pottery studio. It’s getting a doctor’s office soon, too. Employees, townspeople, and reporters alike can go inside and shop, eat, or sit.

Outside the bathrooms — one of the few walled-in areas in the entire building — there’s an Instagram backdrop of fake pink roses that says “You’re like really boring ❤️❤️” in script. Most of the other sections of the plaza are delineated simply by furniture. The barber shop was closed the times I visited, and the pottery studio was still under construction.

The bodega has the same posh product selection as a tiny Whole Foods: drinks with adaptogens, ample craft beer, Momofuku Chili Crunch, the olive oil that every Instagram cook uses. It saves employees and locals a trip to the nearest H-E-B, 12 minutes away, so it’s genuinely helpful if you need milk, wine, or Tylenol and don’t want to go far. The bodega also serves prepared foods like subs, nacho platters, and, seasonally, pumpkin brown-sugar lattes.

The whole building is pretty low-traffic in the morning, only getting somewhat busy at lunchtime, after work, and on weekends. Musk employees and some locals stop by to pick up bread or let their kids blow off steam while the parents get a beer at the Prufrock Pub, named after Musk’s tunnel-boring machine, itself a reference to a T.S. Eliot poem. The wall above the U-shaped bar is decorated with a flamethrower.

The building also has an entertainment area, featuring three TV screens and several Nintendo Wiis. For some reason, there’s an entirely separate candy store in addition to all the treats available at the bodega. The whole place screams “bachelor,” and it has the warmth of a man cave in a suburban garage. 

Next to the bodega is a larger, but otherwise basically identical, structure. Its interior is under construction and it’ll house X’s Safety Support Center. County Commissioner Mel Hamner said the building is the “advanced party of X” until it builds a new three- or four-story building for X’s headquarters nearby. When I was there, a herd of contractors was putting up sheetrock and tinting the windows. 

Outside the Hyperloop Plaza are picnic tables, a pickleball court, a playground, and a food truck that serves lunch and dinner. It supposedly sells tacos, Texas caviar, and venison summer sausage, but I never saw it open.

SpaceX, just across from the playground

At Snailbrook, a 15-minute drive can get you plenty. But you’re also not in a huge city, and 15 minutes is still 15 minutes, especially if you’re a young professional used to the creature comforts of San Francisco or New York.

When you learn that many of Musk’s employees are younger men, it starts to make sense why they would opt to rent a subsidized trailer in Snailbrook when their six-figure salary could buy them pretty much any house in the area. The Snailbrook trailers reportedly start at $800 a month, cheaper than the area’s median rent of $1,950, per Zillow.

Anyone who’s had the joy of looking through the site-development plans for Musk’s businesses and town will know that someone, presumably Musk, changes their mind often. Perhaps as a result, much of his town seems like a rush job. 

The main Hyperloop Plaza building didn’t appear to have insulation in its walls, which makes the space swelter in the summer, despite the air-conditioning, since temperatures regularly surpass 100 degrees. You can buy cans of pretty much any drink imaginable at the bodega, but I couldn’t find anywhere to recycle them. 

The playground doesn’t have a sunshade, which seems criminal in central Texas. The playground equipment itself is also residential grade, like something you’d buy from a big-box store, so it’s often broken. When I visited, bolts were coming out of one of the play structures, leaving it shaky. A ladder that had been split was recently sistered with a two-by-four. 

The juxtaposition is jarring. SpaceX’s massive satellite-internet facility — whose products are connecting people around the world to high-speed internet — sits visible across the street, just beyond the slide. There, laborers are feverishly working on an expansion that will more than double the size of the factory, which recently produced its millionth Starlink kit. On the other side of the playground, Boring is testing state-of-art tunneling equipment that aims to do nothing less than “solve traffic” and “transform cities.”

Everything in the company town feels well intentioned but underbaked. Hyperloop Plaza’s website boasts events — a pickleball tournament, yoga, a home-buying seminar — that have long since passed. Business cards and flyers for home rentals, job openings, and local activities line a corkboard and table at the entry, but many of them seemed out of date.

While pretty much everybody I talked to told me regulation in Bastrop is generally lax, the county does oversee construction that would affect the roads, floodplain, or drinking water. Musk’s companies have repeatedly run up against issues, even in that lenient environment.

Chap Ambrose lived in this area with his family for about a decade before Musk started buying up and developing the properties surrounding his home. Now his homestead is bordered on three sides by Musk’s businesses.

One of his first indications that something was afoot came in 2021, when Ambrose noticed a number of young men trucking porta-potties down his dirt road. The laborers were cagey at first about who they were working for but eventually, after Ambrose helped them move the bathrooms, they explained they were with Boring. 

On learning what would happen to the rural pasture beyond his home, Ambrose had mixed feelings.

“It was both sad, like this is going to change and we had other dreams, but also this could be interesting with Musk,” said Ambrose, a software engineer who described himself as a fan of a number of Musk’s projects.

Now from Ambrose’s hilltop home, the SpaceX building looms where he used to watch cows graze. Where you’d once have heard birds singing, there’s now incessant beeping from construction vehicles and even conversations from workers at Musk’s properties in the distance.

Ambrose has sounded the alarm on some environmental trespasses by Musk’s companies, including how they affect the river, as part of an effort dubbed “Keep Bastrop Boring.” Ambrose has made friends with a number of workers at Musk’s companies and believes they’re good people with good intentions. But he thinks the problems might be coming from the top.

“I think they’re under immense pressure and just get told to do things that they have no expertise or understanding in,” he told me, wearing a cowboy shirt and hat on the patio outside his home. He added, though, that he’s been trying to work with Musk’s companies rather than against them.

“It was a process of, ‘How’s this going to change and how can we make it the best?’” Ambrose said. “Being angry doesn’t really make it better.”

Ellen Tanner attended a Texas Commission on Environmental Quality meeting after Boring requested to regularly pump treated wastewater into the river. The tunnel-digging outfit eventually signed a deal to use Bastrop’s new water-treatment plant instead of offloading the wastewater into the river. Earlier this year, the TCEQ fined Boring for water-quality violations in other construction projects, including ineffective erosion controls to minimize pollution discharge and dumping industrial storm water without a permit.

“They should be treating the river like it’s solid gold,” Tanner said, “especially here with all this drought and heat.” 

Hamner, who’s in his last year in office, said that though there have been some issues getting Musk’s businesses to follow proper protocol, they eventually resolve them.

“We do have these discussions with them, back and forth, and they’re always leaned into us,” Hamner told me from behind his desk in the annex of the county’s historic courthouse. “But we bring them to a meeting and we sit down and we work it out.”

Getting to that point took some work. 

“We have very minimal requirements here. All you got to do is meet those requirements and we’re going to get along,” Hamner said, relaying a conversation he said he had with Steve Davis, president of Boring. While it’s become a good working relationship, it certainly keeps the county busy. “They’ve tried to rush ahead before they made the improvements,” he said, “but our engineering department is down there almost weekly.” 

Musk’s nearby Montessori school, for example, didn’t have a big enough well for the roughly 50 students it initially planned to accept, so it had to reduce the number of children it could admit until it resolves the issue. For now it’s taking on just 16 students.

Hamner said Musk has overall been an economic boost to the county, which has benefited from the added taxes. He said that because Musk prefers speed over red tape, his companies don’t ask for tax abatements. Musk, Hamner said, has “more money than he’s got good sense.”

Musk’s businesses and properties in the area, which add up to more than 600 acres, paid a total of about $109,000 in taxes last year, a Sherwood review of data from the Bastrop County Tax Assessor found. For comparison’s sake, Ambrose, Musk’s neighbor who owns 10 acres, paid about $5,500 last year by himself. But as Musk’s businesses grow and convert more of the agricultural land to production, those taxes are going up. The bill this year will be almost $2 million.

How Bastrop is changing

Real-estate agent Judah Ross moved to Bastrop for the same reasons many people move there. For one, it’s less hectic and dense than Austin, where he moved from a few years ago with his wife and young son. The small-town atmosphere also reminds him of where he grew up in New Jersey, a place where people knew their neighbors. Bastrop is also close to nature.

“The main thing that drew us out here was the natural surroundings,” said Ross, who lives outside downtown Bastrop and enjoys walking to the river and hiking in the state park. “You’ll find a lot of people here are really drawn to that.”

While he’s torn on some of the aspects of Bastrop’s recent growth, Ross, who owns Bastrop Real Estate Group and whose license plate reads “SELLTX,” generally sees it as a good thing, both for his work and his family.

“People want that small-town vibe and that community, but everyone to some extent benefits from the growth,” Ross, wearing a pale pink polo, said as he drove me around the numerous housing developments popping up in the area near Musk’s businesses. He referenced the influx of new restaurants as well as jobs that keep some people from having to commute to Austin for work.

Ross said he sees a lot of SpaceX and Boring employees moving from California to make their home in Bastrop township, as well as the ever-expanding subdivisions and apartment developments closer to their jobs. Others are taking advantage of the relatively cheap cost of land to buy acreage out in the country and build their own homesteads.

But the sell isn’t easy for everyone.

“I get the sense from a lot of the employees that they’re not ready to commit, so even if they have a good job here, they’ll rent for a year, or they’ll keep renting,” he said, because it’s more convenient and less committal. “They’re not sure about planting roots here, buying it, or they’re just not sure what Elon’s gonna do.”

Musk, of course, has a reputation for abruptly axing staff, having said he slashed about 80% of Twitter’s workforce after taking ownership of the social-media site. Trump has even tapped Musk to head an extragovernmental department meant to cut federal jobs and the budget. 

Some skip the opportunity to work for Musk entirely.

“I had a buyer who had a job offer at SpaceX and he was concerned about moving out to a small town and not being able to find schools for his kids,” he said. “He ended up not coming out.” 

A number of people I spoke with mentioned the need for better schools in the area, and that seems like something Musk is aiming to tackle with his Montessori school — if it can accept more students. 

Hamner said the county is expecting its population to nearly double from about 120,000 to 220,000 by the end of the decade. By 2040, it could be more than 300,000. There are 27 housing developments — a total of 25,000 homes — underway in the area, he said. 

That will necessitate huge infrastructure updates. The area’s water-treatment plant will have to double or triple in capacity, and the stoplights I was stuck at on I-71 will be turned into highway overpasses to ease traffic.

“You don’t have to like him to appreciate what he’s doing.”

Amid all this change, locals are hoping that Bastrop’s quaint downtown, with its brick facades and Old West porticos, will remain the same. The city’s streets already teem with independent businesses: breweries and bookstores, farm-to-table restaurants and greasy spoons, museums and art galleries.

“Our historic downtown is kind of a sanctuary, landlocked and off the highway,” said Jamie Howard, owner and director of the art gallery Found Fine Art. “It’s almost perfectly laid out to stay preserved.”

Howard, who drives a green Tesla Cybertruck, said Musk’s businesses and town are an economic boon for the community. She said about half her gallery’s business comes from Musk’s employees.

“Probably right when we first opened, one of the things we noticed right away was about half the people coming in said they were from Bastrop. But when you dug a little bit deeper, it was like, ‘Oh, but we just moved here. We’re with Tesla, we’re with SpaceX, we’re with Boring.’”

A common going-away or retirement gift for people at Musk’s companies is one of the gallery’s $850 miniature chrome longhorn sculptures that can sit on an office desk.

“For the whole time I’ve lived here, Bastrop has been about to blow up, and this is the change that needed to happen for us to really come into our own,” said Howard, who’s lived in Bastrop for more than two decades. “You don’t have to like him to appreciate what he’s doing.”

Howard certainly does. She said her Cybertruck is “one of the best-built vehicles” she’s ever experienced and she’s considering selling her Ford Bronco to buy a second one.

As a whole, residents who spoke with me were cautiously optimistic about Musk and his development. Of course, they also don’t really have a choice in the matter, since it’s happening regardless.

Doris Williams, a retired lieutenant colonel in the US Army who was born in Bastrop but spent most of her life elsewhere in Texas, moved from Austin back to Bastrop in May.

She’s the president of the board of directors of the future Bastrop County African American Cultural Center and Freedom Colonies Museum. It’s planning to break ground on a $25 million facility next to the train tracks early next year. Currently, the museum is housed in a 600-square-foot historic home nearby. 

Williams’ grandmother, who was born on land that was formerly a plantation in Bastrop and who descended from enslaved people there, was part of a generation who’d left the area. 

“They wanted to leave because it was Jim Crow and they were oppressed,” she said, though her grandmother ultimately asked to be buried in Bastrop. “They wanted a better life.”

But Bastrop has changed for the better in recent years, she said, thanks in part to the influx of younger people drawn in by Musk’s businesses. 

“They’re bringing in new ideas, they’re bringing in money, they have good-paying jobs, they are bringing in arts,” she said. 

What’s one thing these small-town Texans have in common with a South African immigrant billionaire Technoking? Their opinion of Bastrop.

“It’s the place to be,” Williams said.