Ammon News - Voters in a small patch of south Texas voted on Saturday to give Elon Musk a town to call his own, officially creating a new city called Starbase in the area where Musk’s SpaceX holds rocket launches.

A couple of hundred residents of what was previously known as Boca Chica decided to make their unincorporated neighborhoods into a town that will grant them the authority to pass city ordinances.

The ballot, which also named a senior SpaceX representative as its mayor with 100% of the early vote, was never really in doubt.

Most of the 283 eligible voters were SpaceX employees or had connections to the company, whose billionaire chief has long wanted a human mission to Mars.

“Starbase, Texas,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X, “Is now a real city!”

His post came after polls closed and unofficial results published by Cameron County showed an unambiguous 97.7% backing for the project.

The creation of Starbase puts Musk in the unusual position of holding sway over a company town, a distinction that has more in common with Gilded Age industrialists than most modern US businesses. It is a small victory for the world’s richest man as he pivots away from his job as de facto leader of the “department of government efficiency” – a role that has elicited furious backlash and hurt his public image as well as his businesses. The Guardian