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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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5