Elon Musk's new brainchild promises a dark and desperate future

On Saturday, the town of Starbase, Texas, was born. The town includes Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch facility and company-owned land covering 1.6 square miles.

If Musk and Donald Trump have their way, America as a whole could eventually be Starbase, Texas.

Consider:

Starbase is a company town. That company is Musk’s SpaceX. Its new mayor, Bobby Peden, is a SpaceX vice president. He was the only name on the ballot. Its two commissioners are also SpaceX employees. The local measure creating Starbase passed 212 to 6. Almost everyone who voted works for SpaceX or has a relative who does.

America is starting to look like one big national company town. The largest 1 percent of U.S. corporations now own a record 97 percent of all U.S. corporate assets. Fewer big corporations dominate every American industry, and they’re exerting more political influence than ever. Musk and Trump are twisting tax laws and regulations in favor of even fewer big corporations.

Starbase is hardly a democracy. It’s the brainchild of Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who founded the town because he didn’t want to deal with local regulations in getting approvals for his space launches. Musk’s DOGE has hamstrung federal agencies under whose authority SpaceX falls, such as the EPA and FAA — which just decided to allow him to go from five Starship launches a year to 25.

America, too, is looking less and less like a democracy. One man posts executive orders on social media, often without explanation or reason — and entire industries are created or destroyed, hundreds of thousands of jobs are terminated, universities and law firms are threatened, and legal residents of the United States are abducted without court hearings. Several of his advisers have disdained democracy and openly admired authoritarian Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and the late Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore.

It’s hard to know what’s happening in Starbase. There’s no independent press, and Starbase has explained little about its plans for the new city. Reporters can’t simply wander in and interview whomever they wish.

It’s getting to be that way in America too. We don’t know what Trump is going to do next or why. The White House selects the reporters and outlets it wants in its press pool. Some big outlets, such as The Washington Post and CBS, are owned by the super-rich who want to curry favor with Trump and don’t want to anger him, so they limit what their outlets can say.

Starbase is harming the environment. The first integrated Starship vehicle launched from the site in April 2023 exploded in midflight, igniting a 3.5-acre fire south of the pad site in Boca Chica State Park and sending debris thousands of feet into the air. State and federal regulators fined SpaceX for violations of the Clean Water Act and said the company had repeatedly polluted waters in the Boca Chica area.

America’s environment is also endangered — due in part to Musk and Trump, who are eviscerating environmental protections in favor of large private profit-making ventures like, well, Musk’s Starship.

Starbase is the brainchild of a single multibillionaire. He plans to live there part of the time with some of his 14 children and their four mothers, and he ultimately decides all important matters for the town.

America is the part-time home of many of the world’s billionaires, who also have outsized influence over important matters the nation deals with.

Finally, Starbase is insular. It will not share its tax revenue with anyone else. Because it’s incorporated separately, the town will keep for itself all the revenue generated by its property-owning taxpayers.

Trump’s America is becoming as insular as Starbase. Trump has all but eliminated USAID along with medical and humanitarian aid to war-ravaged people around the world. He’s cutting trade and deporting residents with student visas and green cards who don’t toe the company line.

So is Musk’s Starbase the future of America? Only if we let it become so.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.