Elon Musk is now officially Austin's
Tesla boosted headcount 86% last year to 22,777 in the fast-growing region in Texas, where the carmaker churns out Model Y SUVs and angular Cybertrucks. It surpassed grocery store chain H-E-B, according to a new annual compliance report Tesla filed with Travis County's economic development program.
Tesla's massive Gigafactory Texas is the anchor of Musk's ever-growing presence in the state: He's building a lithium refinery near Corpus Christi. Bastrop, about 30 miles east of Austin, is
Musk's companies and the related economic activity they generate reach $11.1 billion a year, estimates Ray Perryman, who runs an economic research firm in Waco.
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"It is rare that a single individual develops such diverse enterprises with substantial impact across various regions," Perryman said. "The direct impact of companies which Elon Musk has brought to Texas is as large as some significant manufacturing sectors, such as beverage or electrical equipment production."
For years, Musk was a creature of California: A Silicon Valley entrepreneur as
His aggressive expansion in Texas has ruffled some feathers. Residents of Boca Chica have complained about the noise and debris created by his rocket launches, and in March the state approved a land swap with SpaceX that cedes 43 acres of Boca Chica State Park to the company in exchange for 477 acres adjacent to the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge. The idea is that if damaging the nearby site is unavoidable,
Near the SpaceX facility in McGregor, residents have complained about the rumbling and rattling from test engines. And in Bastrop, local organizations came out against Boring's permit to dump tens of thousands of gallons of treated wastewater into the Colorado River, though there's now a plan for Musk's companies to hook up to the city utility system.
SpaceX has said in filings that it has more than 2,000 workers at its operations in far South Texas near Brownsville; Musk's X social media platform has said it plans to hire 100 people in the capital city; His Neuralink brain-implant firm has 300 people in Austin, according to Opportunity Austin.
Tesla said its lithium factory,
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The site in Bastrop is also the closest that members of the public can get to the Musk operations. Near the SpaceX and Boring facilities, Musk has erected a steel building with a cafe and grocer called the Boring Bodega, the Prufrock Pub named after the Boring machine that drills tunnels, the His & Hers Barbershop Salon and pickleball courts.
"Everybody's trying to gear up and capture the growth that's coming here," said Becki Womble, the chief of the Chamber of Commerce in Bastrop, where two new elementary schools are opening to accommodate estimates for the population to grow more than fivefold to 63,000 by 2030.
The facility near Corpus Christi is still a massive construction site, laid out on a desolate stretch of the coastal plains in South Texas with little industry and not much money to spare. The $380 million project is the
As Musk's Texas empire grows, he's spending a lot of time in Austin, which is home to several people within his orbit. At one point, Musk planned to build a house on a former horse farm that he had purchased across the Colorado River from his Gigafactory, according to Walter Isaacson's biography, but it appears never to have been constructed.
"For Musk, the heart and lungs of this operation are going to be in Austin going forward domestically," said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities said in a phone interview. "It's not just about the Gigafactory, it's about what that means for battery technology and that the whole supply chain that surrounds Tesla will follow to Texas."
