The South Texas home of Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX is on its way to become an official city known as Starbase as local residents vote on Sunday to incorporate a patch of land known as Boca Chica Village into a new municipality, BBC reported. The vote to formally organize Starbase as a city was being approved by a lopsided margin by a small group of voters who live there and are mostly Musk's employees at SpaceX. Reports had suggested that formation of the new city was almost confirmed as most of the 283 voters eligible to vote are employees of SpaceX or are connected to the space company in some form or the other. Starbase is the facility and launch site for the SpaceX rocket program that is under contract with the Department of Defense and NASA that hopes to send astronauts back to the moon and someday to Mars. Starbase, Texas Is now a real city! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 4, 2025 According to election records of Cameron County, at least 200 people had already voted at the close of early voting on Tuesday but the list did not include Elon Musk, who had voted in the county in an election in November. It wasn’t immediately clear if the tech billionaire intends to vote. During the counting, 177 votes had been taken into account until 7pm Saturday (local time) and 173 had favoured for the formation of the city of Starbase, New York Times reported. Now, since the election results have favoured SpaceX, a new municipality would be created in Texas that would pave the way for a new local government with a mayor and two commissioners who would have powers to administer planning, taxation and other local issues. However, a few local residents have opposed the formation of the new municipality under the aegis of Starbase, accusing SpaceX of harming the local environment. The proposed city of Starbase has about 1.6 sq miles (3.9 sq km) area and the population remained distinctively low until SpaceX began purchasing the land in the area, BBC reported. Elon Musk first floated the idea of Starbase in 2021.
