X’s new home is a bodega and 15 trailers in a trench coat
Some things are smaller in Texas.
In July, Elon Musk announced the company formerly known as Twitter would be moving to Austin. Not quite.
According to Forbes, which cites court documents, Bastrop County, Texas, will be the new home of X now that it has closed up shop in San Francisco. It’s 40 minutes outside Austin, depending on traffic, which there’s a lot more of these days.
The rural location is outside the city of Bastrop, which has a population of about 10,000. It’s the home of SpaceX’s Starlink facility as well as the headquarters location for the Boring Company, Musk’s drilling outfit.
July drone footage from Joe Tegtmeyer, a YouTuber who documents developments at Musk’s businesses, shows a new facility being constructed next to the Hyperloop Plaza that will likely house X employees. Currently, X is hiring “safety agents” in Bastrop who will be “responsible for helping our users successfully and safely use our platform” by “combating spam and fraud, and providing support to our customers.”
Forbes, citing X’s real estate director, said X has 188 employees in Texas and will eventually base its Austin employees in Bastrop. Fortune earlier this month said San Francisco employees have been shuttling to offices an hour away in San Jose and Palo Alto and fear they may have to move to Bastrop to keep their jobs. The report said fewer than 500 engineers are left at X.
Musk is in the process of building a company town for his employees in Bastrop County called Snailbrook, named after the Boring Co’s slow-going mascot. The plan, according to reporting last year from the Wall Street Journal, is to build at least 110 homes and potentially incorporate the town.
Construction hasn’t started on those homes yet, Chap Ambrose, a Bastrop County resident whose property abuts the plots, told me. So far the company town consists of roughly 15 residential trailers, as well as a center of commerce called Hyperloop Plaza, which includes a bodega, pickleball courts, a his-and-hers salon, and a pub that looks like an unfinished garage man-cave. The development where X will be is not quite bustling just yet. The nearby city of Bastrop, though, has been getting a lot of new restaurants in the last few years, a city official told me, while the county has been overrun by new residential development.
Bastrop County’s population has jumped 17% in the last four years, and 2.5% in the last year, according to data from Placer.ai. That’s more than double the percentage growth of Austin, one of the fastest growing cities in the country, in that time. Traffic in the county has also swelled in the past few years, thanks to Musk companies’ development.
