Elon Musk Plans To Develop Town Named Snailbrook Near His Planned Austin, Texas SpaceX And Boring Co. Facilities

An aerial view of Elon Musk's Snailbrook community under construction on March 13, 2023 in Bastrop County, Texas. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

X’s new home is a bodega and 15 trailers in a trench coat

Some things are smaller in Texas.

Rani Molla

9/20/24 12:19PM

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.

Elon Musk company town Snailbrook site overview — YouTube screenshot from Joe Tegtmeyer video in July

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.

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Tesla’s made-in-China vehicle sales jumped 36% in April

Tesla’s sales of made-in-China vehicles — sold across China, Europe, and other international markets — rose 36% year over year to 79,478 units in April. The increase marks the sixth straight month of annual growth in sales of vehicles made in the world’s largest manufacturing economy, suggesting the EV maker’s overseas business may be stabilizing after a difficult stretch.

That said, China wholesale deliveries fell from March, even as overall new energy vehicle sales rose 7% during the period.

Later this month, the China Passenger Car Association will report China-only sales, offering a clearer picture of performance in Tesla’s second-largest market.

Tesla China April wholesale sales jump year-on-year but slip from March

Later this month, the China Passenger Car Association will report China-only sales, offering a clearer picture of performance in Tesla’s second-largest market.

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Anthropic’s scramble for compute now includes rival xAI

Another day, another major partnership with an AI rival. This time, Anthropic signed a deal with SpaceX’s xAI to access compute from its Colossus 1 data center to help it improve capacity for its Claude Pro and Claude Max subscribers. Just yesterday, The Information reported that Anthropic planned to spend $200 billion on Google Cloud services over the next five years. As Sherwood News’ Luke Kawa wrote:

“Anthropic has been a victim of its own success: the popularity of Claude Code and Cowork have revealed compute constraints and left users frustrated by caps. In response, the Claude developer has embarked upon a mad scramble for compute, striking or expanding deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google, and Broadcom.”

Now, it’s adding xAI to the list — even as the Elon Musk company builds a competing model.

In less terrestrial news, xAI said that as part of the agreement, Anthropic “expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”

xAI — Creators of Grok, the AI Chatbot

“Anthropic has been a victim of its own success: the popularity of Claude Code and Cowork have revealed compute constraints and left users frustrated by caps. In response, the Claude developer has embarked upon a mad scramble for compute, striking or expanding deals with CoreWeave, Amazon, Google, and Broadcom.”

Now, it’s adding xAI to the list — even as the Elon Musk company builds a competing model.

In less terrestrial news, xAI said that as part of the agreement, Anthropic “expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity.”

5/6/26

TEST TIME!

Meet your new interview partner: Claude

Chris Stokel-Walker

Rani Molla5/6/26

SpaceX and Tesla’s Terafab could cost $119 billion — far more than expected

The initial phase of SpaceX and Tesla’s joint chip production effort, called Terafab, could cost $55 billion, with additional phases adding up to $119 billion in capital investment, Reuters reports, citing a notice posted on a Texas county website. Ultimately the goal of Terafab is to build enough in-house AI chip capacity to supply both companies.

The price tag is also higher than expected. Morgan Stanley had previously estimated Terafab would cost $34 billion to $45 billion.

Fortunately for Tesla, whose capex is expected to skyrocket this year, much of the early spending will sit on SpaceX’s balance sheet.

Here’s Musk on the last earnings call:

“SpaceX is going to take care of like the initial phase of the scaled up Terafab... Any kind of intercompany thing has to be approved by both the SpaceX and Tesla board of directors. It’s got to go through a conflict resolution. It’s going to have, unfortunately, a lot of complexity because we’ve got to make sure Tesla shareholders are served and SpaceX shareholders are served, and strike the right balance there.”

SpaceX files plan for $55 billion Terafab chip facility in Texas

The price tag is also higher than expected. Morgan Stanley had previously estimated Terafab would cost $34 billion to $45 billion.

Fortunately for Tesla, whose capex is expected to skyrocket this year, much of the early spending will sit on SpaceX’s balance sheet.

Here’s Musk on the last earnings call:

“SpaceX is going to take care of like the initial phase of the scaled up Terafab... Any kind of intercompany thing has to be approved by both the SpaceX and Tesla board of directors. It’s got to go through a conflict resolution. It’s going to have, unfortunately, a lot of complexity because we’ve got to make sure Tesla shareholders are served and SpaceX shareholders are served, and strike the right balance there.”

Rani Molla5/5/26

Apple to let users choose between Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI models

Apple has been inching toward letting outside AI power its devices — and now it’s going further.

The company plans to let users choose between rival AI models across iOS 27, due this fall, expanding beyond ChatGPT to include players like Google and Anthropic, Bloomberg reports. The difference this time: deeper integration, with outside models powering features like Siri, writing tools, and image generation across the system.

Currently, Apple’s voice assistant, Siri, gives users the ability to query ChatGPT, but doing so requires a clunky extra step and usage has been poor. Meanwhile, Apple’s own AI tools have fallen short. (Apple has decided to use Google’s Gemini to power Siri in the future.) It’s not clear users care which AI is under the hood — as long as it works.