Elon Musk is amplifying far-right political movements around the world
Elon Musk has used his platform to amplify far-right voices and policies from Germany to the U.K. and beyond.
Jason Alley has owned his cattle farm for almost 13 years.
Through his work on over 91 acres at the corner of Farm-to-Market 1209 and FM 969, he has watched Elon Musk’s companies expand over the surrounding land in Texas.
Alley said he sees construction start months before he reads about it in the news. He said he receives inquiries three times a week about selling his land, occasionally from one of the tech billionaire’s companies.
“I’ve got a lot of questions. I hear these things that may or may not happen. I don’t know if they’re true or not true. They just keep everything quiet. … Overall, I think it’s a good thing. I mean, the land values have gone up,” Alley — whose farm’s market value is over $1.558 million — told the American-Statesman.
A movie studio, data centers, manufacturing facilities and plants alike have been flocking to this small town less than 30 miles east of Austin.
The anticipated impact of these businesses could be transformative for the roughly 9-square-mile town. Yet, the potential economic boom of Musk choosing Bastrop for his business utopia could be even more profound.
Owning more than 400 acres of land, Musk is transforming the area on FM 1209, south of FM 969, into his business utopia, dubbed “Snailbrook.” Musk announced in July his intent to move some of his companies’ headquarters to Texas. In September, he decided his social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, would be joining the Boring Co. and SpaceX in Bastrop.
The presence of the world’s richest man in Bastrop, through his companies, is already being felt by residents and local business owners. Meanwhile, his influence in the White House as President Donald Trump’s closest ally is beginning to take shape.
But perhaps not in the ways they might have expected.
“People get excited or ready or primed for a certain group or business of some kind to come in, and then it doesn’t exactly pan out,” said Meagan Webb, CEO of the Children’s Advocacy Center and chair of the Bastrop Chamber of Commerce board of directors. “So, it does feel right now like we’re in a really big preparation stage, where all this housing is growing, all these things are exploding, to try to anticipate the need.”
Economic impact in Bastrop slower than expected
The anticipated economic effect is ongoing — and still building — but it’s still slower than some residents and businesses expected. The great migration from Musk-affiliated companies has yet to fully take shape.
Deadra Turnbow has lived in Bastrop for nearly 10 years, watching the city grow around her. But as the owner of Unique Beads and Bangles by Deadra, located in a shared space downtown, she said business hasn’t yet picked up the way she had hoped
“Definitely have grown a lot. A lot of people are moving here,” Turnbow said. “Business has not grown with it, unfortunately.”
Bastrop’s population has increased nearly 60% in the past decade, with the city reporting its total population as well over 14,000 residents.
Due to the arrival of Musk’s companies, the expansion of the greater Austin area and more development along Texas 71, Bastrop expects to see its population increase to 20,000 by 2029. The city had fewer than 6,000 residents at the turn of this century
Bastrop was once home to older generations, retirees and tenured professionals. Now, the median age is 35 years old, and the majority of people moving to Bastrop are recently married or are younger families.
“Times are always changing, and it is a huge growth,” said David Ramming, who owns Rambo Materials LLC near Musk’s businesses in Bastrop. His company is a local supplier to Musk’s ongoing construction in the area.
“It’s way different than what it was in the ’90s when I was a kid,” he said. “Change, that’s the only thing that’s constant, is change.”
There are currently 5,805 total households in Bastrop, with at least 3,000 additional homes slated for 2025 to accommodate some of the expected growth.
The influx of residents means more than new jobs, new businesses and new housing.
“Bastrop is a tale of two cities here,” said Tom Dickey, who owns Neighbors Kitchen & Yard with his wife in downtown Bastrop. “There is absolutely growth. It has gone from this slow town with lots of locals where you either grew up in Bastrop or you moved here a long time ago … to now where we see this huge tsunami of humanity supposedly coming our direction.”
How a city copes with rapid growth
For Sylvia Carrillo-Trevino, this growth needs to be dealt with head-on, from all sides, including the least glamorous parts of municipal governance.
“You got to get the underground, the unsexy part,” Carrillo-Trevino, Bastrop’s city manager and interim executive director of the Bastrop Economic Development Corp., told the American-Statesman. “Nobody likes to talk about wastewater or any of those things, but you can’t do anything without those things.”
In the case of wastewater, Bastrop reached a triparty agreement last year with SpaceX and Corix. This agreement came after SpaceX and Musk’s Boring Co. applied for permits in 2023 to discharge more than 100,000 gallons of treated wastewater per day into the Colorado River.
The triparty deal enables the treatment of wastewater for properties along FM 1209 and FM 969 in unincorporated Bastrop County. Infrastructure needed to service the properties is expected to be completed by next year, with the city prepared to spend a total of $667.47 million on the ongoing wastewater projects, according to the 2024 State of the City presentation.
Outside of the wastewater agreement, Carrillo-Trevino’s 2025 agenda aims to address all the ways the city needs to measure up ahead of rapid expansion and population growth.
“Affordability,” Carrillo-Trevino said. “Let’s just keep the taxes and the debt low and not go overextend ourselves. It’s a multifaceted approach. It’s not just any sort of one thing to prepare, because they’re here.”
But the anticipated growth can’t be exclusively attributed to the presence of Musk’s companies.
Bastrop 522 film studios, a project three years in the making from former actor and Line 204 CEO Alton Butler, is expected to bring 1,000 jobs to Bastrop and generate $59 million for the local economy, according to an economic impact report by Impact DataSource. Bastrop County recently approved tax abatements for EdgeConneX to build a four-building, $1.4 billion data center campus. Other manufacturers, including aerospace company Acutronic which expects to bring 50 jobs to Bastrop with the state’s first jet engine factory, have eyed building to the east of Austin.
Utilities. Parks. Street widening. Parking. Schools. Access roads. Transportation. Affordable housing. And most importantly, code revisions. These issues are all at the forefront of the city’s agenda in 2025.
Bastrop City Hall, however, has faced recent turmoil as one City Council member and then-Mayor Lyle Nelson attempted to have Carrillo-Trevino terminated or investigated over how she handled $2.06 million in spending. Weeks later, Nelson resigned ahead of a possible move to hold a recall election.
Carrillo-Trevino said her focus remains fixed on doing what is needed to ensure Bastrop stays a great place to live and isn’t swallowed by big businesses and surrounding communities.
Bastrop allows two accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, per property, equaling about four structures no matter the lot size; an ADU is a secondary housing until built on the same lot as a single-family home. The city also doesn’t have parking minimums, lot size minimums or consistent requirements for water lines and sprinkler systems in homes and businesses downtown.
These problems and necessary fixes will turn into nightmares for Bastrop if not addressed, Carrillo-Trevino said. The unglamorous aspects of supporting growth are the only way for true development to flourish in Bastrop, she said. They don’t want to play catch-up.
Playing catch-up is exactly what Bastrop Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Becki Womble said the school district is forced to do.
The Bastrop district serves 13,000 students in Bastrop, Cedar Creek, Red Rock, Rockne and Paige. At 433 square miles, it’s geographically one of the largest districts in Texas.
Along with improvements for every brick-and-mortar school, the district’s 2021 bond included two new schools that opened in August 2023. In the 2023 bond, two more new schools were approved by voters, one set to open this August and the other possibly in fall 2026. The next bond will include a new high school, Womble said.
Some of the schools built or improved through the 2021 bond are already having to use additional portable classrooms to accommodate increased enrollment and class sizes, Womble said.
“That’s how much the growth is,” Womble said. “Those two bonds were catch-up bonds, if they caught us up; I’m not even sure it caught us up.”
The Bastrop district declined requests for an interview or comment about the rapid growth and expansion of the schools.
Although the city and school district are working to catch up with increased development and the expected migration associated with Musk’s employees, one industry in particular has done extensive prep work: housing.
In December 2023, there were only 11 active listings in Bastrop. This past December, that number had skyrocketed to 565.
With the council regularly approving multifamily and apartment housing, and developments like the Colony increasing the number of homes built, city leaders expect Bastrop to have about 9,000 total households by the end of 2025, up from just under 6,000 last year.
“They overdid it at the beginning,” said Liana Walker, a realtor for Wisdom House Realty Group in Bastrop. “And now we’re just waiting and waiting and waiting.”
Womble said when she first arrived in Bastrop a decade ago, the City Council was excited to see 64 total housing permits in one year. Today, each housing development includes a minimum of four permits and there are more on the docket every month than the last.
Walker said the market, while reflecting the real estate market nationwide, hasn’t been very good in Bastrop, as more homes were built than the number of people currently looking to move to town. Out of the 565 active listings in December, 120 were new listings, 108 closed and 95 were pending sales at the end of the month.
“We still are waiting for the great migration,” Walker said. “I feel like it hasn’t happened yet. Like people are just anticipating it happening.”
Bastrop small businesses, residents await the changes waiting in the wings
Michelle Mestres grew up in Miami, attended college just outside of Boston and had lived in Los Angeles with her now-fiancé Joseph Abinader, who works at SpaceX. In February of last year, he was presented with a promotion and asked to pack up and move to Bastrop within the month.
“It was very much a last-minute quick decision. When we got here, I honestly didn’t know what to expect. I’ve always been in big cities. All I could imagine of this place was that it was in the middle of nowhere,” Mestres said. “I am that type of person that will set my expectations lower, so that when the thing actually happens and it’s actually better than I expected, I’m like, ‘Oh, OK, we’re good. I expected so much worse than this.’ That’s kind of what I was expecting going into the move.”
Mestres, who works remotely in sales for a company based in Tennessee, and Abinader rent an apartment on the east side of town near Buc-ee’s. They recently signed contracts to build a home in the Colony near the SpaceX facilities.
Mestres said she wants to involve herself in the community, she wants to shop and eat locally and become a Bastropian but having the big box stores and shopping centers helps when she’s used to living in some of the country’s largest metropolises.
“This is definitely a smaller town than I’m used to,” Mestres said. “It’s getting a little bit more suburban. Still a lot more cows than I’m used to, but I actually kind of like it.”
The growth of Bastrop is most visible along the Texas 71 corridor, with new chains, department stores, shopping centers and restaurants popping up sporadically.
“Those are the chains, and there’ll be some excitement at first, but then I think they’ll go back to where everybody knows your name,” Womble said. “So, our restaurants are going to have to brace for that, because they’ll probably have a little bit of dip.”
Some local storefronts downtown haven’t seen business climb as expected with the arrival of more retailers in town.
The Chamber of Commerce has seen double-digit increases in membership investment since 2020. But this past year, they ended with a 2.6% increase, about 4 points under their budgeted increase.
“Last year, businesses were struggling, even though, yes, there is a growing economy here,” Womble said.
Keith Chamberlain, owner of In the Sticks, said he decided to open his store on Bastrop’s Main Street instead of in Georgetown after learning about Musk’s presence in the town. His first couple months, however, he said business was slow and not profitable.
Even with some small businesses expressing their struggles to the chamber, sales tax revenue has grown by nearly 150% over the past decade, according to data from the Bastrop Economic Development Corp. The vacancy rate downtown has decreased from about 50% to under 10% in that period.
“Those of us who are downtown, we love the growth. It’s more bodies walking the streets. It’s fewer vacant buildings,” Dickey said. “There’s just more energy more often during the week. We’re going to have to make some investments. We have to increase capacity. What are we going to do with all these people? They’re great problems to have, if you want to call them problems.”
Is Bastrop’s small-town feel slipping away?
Dickey has operated Neighbors alongside his wife for the past seven years. The restaurant and brewery, located downtown on 3 acres facing the Colorado River, hosts live music events throughout the week and has become a local hot spot.
Dickey said he has needed to change how he runs business to accommodate the extra customers, like a group of 50-some SpaceX employees who regularly celebrate launches with their partners and families at Neighbors.
“We will always be challenged by the growth, and we’ll always find creative solutions to address it,” Dickey said. “That’s part of the fun of the business, right?”
Not all locals are happy about the change, he said, as his restaurant has started having wait times for the first time in recent months. He introduced electronic wait list systems; handheld ordering and payment systems; and bought additional ovens to move product more efficiently to accommodate the increased demand. He said he’s also looking into how to increase kitchen and seating capacity.
Locals have a lot to get used to with these changes: longer wait times, additional food options, more traffic, less available parking, the busyness of downtown and more. Dickey believes it’s inevitable.
The rapidly changing dynamics of Bastrop are disconcerting to a lot of locals who want to retain the small-town feel. Some have resorted to butting heads in City Council meetings, in Facebook groups online and in pushes to send Musk-affiliated employees back to California.
Mestres said immersing herself in the community is really important to her, especially since she’s planning to build roots here, but she thinks Bastrop’s small-town charm can thrive — even amid growth.
“I want to be respectful of the traditions and of the legacy that Bastrop has built for itself,” she said. “We love downtown and Main Street. I like meeting the business owners and getting to know them and supporting local businesses. I’m very much that type of person, just as much as I am the type of person that would like a Target here. I think both can exist at the same time.”
For Alley, his work on the farm isn’t directly affected by Musk’s development.
He still does his work and plans to do so for at least the next 15 to 20 years. His town, however, has more traffic and more needs than he thinks it’s equipped to handle right now.
“You walk around town, you don’t know every single person like it used to be,” Alley said. “But it’s not a bad thing. It’s good for the community, I guess. We’re just a little bit behind trying to catch up to the growth we need.”
For Alley, he feels the small-town atmosphere slipping away, but the biggest impact he has felt is he doesn’t know what Musk’s future in Bastrop will look like and he doesn’t know what all is happening less than a mile down the road from his cattle farm.
“Eventually this is going to be right on the outskirts of Austin, and there won’t be as much influence from the Bastrop people,” Alley said. “Over the next 20 years, there will be less and less and less influence from us that have been here a while, and more from the outsiders, because they’ll eventually overwhelm us.
“My biggest thing is I have a lot of questions,” he said. “Do you know what’s happening down there? I don’t, and I look at Elon’s stuff every day.”
This story has been updated to add video.
