Residents of SpaceX’s Starbase launch site vote to incorporate as a city

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is getting its own official company town.

Residents of an area around SpaceX’s Starbase launch site in southern Texas voted overwhelmingly on Saturday to incorporate as a city — also named Starbase. According to results posted online by the Cameron County Elections Department, there were 212 votes in favor and only six against.

In a post on his social media site X, Musk wrote that Starbase, Texas “Is now a real city!” 

The new city’s residents are believed to mostly be SpaceX employees. On Saturday, they also voted to elect three current and former Starbase employees — Bobby Peden, Jordan Buss, and Jenna Petrzelka — who ran unopposed to serve, respectively, as Starbase’s mayor and two commissioners.

The Associated Press reports that SpaceX hasn’t shared many specifics about why it wanted to incorporate the area. The company said it already manages the area’s roads, utilities, and “the provisions of schooling and medical care,” and it’s also looking to shift authority from the county to the new city government to close the nearby Boca Chica beach and state park for launches.

Musk — who recently said he would be reducing his role with the Trump administration’s controversial Department of Government Efficiency to a “day or two” per week — announced last year that he was moving SpaceX’s headquarters from El Segundo, California to the Starbase facility in Texas. 

At the time, Musk said he’d “had enough of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building” and that the “final straw” was a California bill that prohibits schools from disclosing students’ sexuality or gender identity without consent.

After last night’s election, a new X account representing the town posted, “Becoming a city will help us continue building the best community possible for the men and women building the future of humanity’s place in space.”