Elon's company town

Summary

Today, Explained: Elon's Company Town

Episode: "Elon's Company Town"
Release Date: January 2, 2025
Hosts: Noel King and Ronnie Mola
Network: Vox Media Podcast Network

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Introduction

In this episode of Today, Explained, hosts Noel King and Ronnie Mola delve into Elon Musk's ambitious project to create a company town named Snailbrook, situated outside of Austin, Texas. Musk envisions Snailbrook as a "utopian" living and working space for employees of his various enterprises, including The Boring Company and X. However, the reality on the ground presents a stark contrast to this lofty vision.

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Elon Musk's Vision for Snailbrook

The episode opens with Noel King describing the elusive nature of Snailbrook:

Noel King [00:01]: "If you open your maps app and you type in Snailbrook, Texas, you will get nothing but a prompt. Snailbrook is not a town just yet. It is currently under construction outside of Austin. The builder, Elon Musk, says Snailbrook will be a company town for employees of his Boring Company and X and etc. He has plans for it to be, quote, utopian."

Musk's plan encompasses not just housing but a complete ecosystem designed to support his workforce, integrating living spaces with work facilities to foster a seamless work-life balance.

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On-the-Ground Report: Snailbrook's Current State

Ronnie Mola provides a firsthand account of Snailbrook’s progress, highlighting the discrepancies between Musk’s utopian aspirations and the present reality:

Ronnie Mola [00:31]: "Which, I mean, it's got a long way to go, it's got a lot of rough edges and it's definitely nothing that you would call like a utopia. So far it's just 15 trailers."

Mola further elaborates on his visit:

Ronnie Mola [02:12]: "So Elon Musk, you know, leader of like six businesses, has been steadily moving those businesses to Texas over the past few years."

Despite Musk’s investment, Snailbrook currently comprises mainly 15 trailers, a gym, a pool, and rudimentary communal areas like the Hyperloop Plaza, which houses a small bodega and other basic amenities. Mola notes the lack of permanence and quality in the infrastructure:

Ronnie Mola [04:39]: "I described it as sort of a tiny Whole Foods. You could get drinks with Adaptogens or the olive oil that everyone uses on Instagram."

The limited development has resulted in a town that feels more transient than the envisioned community, with facilities often in disrepair and amenities scarcely utilized.

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Historical Context: Company Towns in America

To provide perspective, the episode introduces Price Fishback, a Regents and APS Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona, specializing in company towns. Fishback offers a historical overview:

Price Fishback [15:21]: "I wrote a dissertation and a bunch of articles about company towns and company housing and violent strikes and all sorts of things like that."

He explains the original purpose behind company towns:

Price Fishback [15:38]: "One of the major reasons they had [company towns] is isolation. You're just out in the middle of nowhere, and if you need housing, you build it and bring workers there."

Fishback recounts both the successes and failures of historical company towns, emphasizing that while some thrived under benevolent employers, others became sites of severe labor strife, such as the Ludlow Massacre of 1913-1914.

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Expert Insights: Analyzing Snailbrook's Prospects

Fishback assesses Snailbrook’s potential by comparing it to historical precedents:

Price Fishback [22:34]: "I think that’s a feature of it. It’s not how every place developed, but it’s certainly how isolated places developed."

He contends that Musk's resources could transform Snailbrook into a thriving community, provided he moves beyond temporary solutions like trailers and invests in permanent, quality housing and infrastructure.

However, Fishback also points out the significant challenges:

Price Fishback [10:06]: "Regulations. Everyone told me that the regulations in Bastrop County are pretty lax. So, you know, he moved there because the regulations were less tough and stringent than they were in California. But even though they're lax in Bastrop County, they've still run up against them."

The interplay between Musk’s ambitious projects and local regulations poses hurdles that could impact the development timeline and overall success of Snailbrook.

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Future Prospects: Can Snailbrook Thrive?

The discussion turns to whether Snailbrook can evolve into a successful company town:

Noel King [09:42]: "So these days, in this economy, one can own and run a company and not build a town for the company. It's pretty common. Does building a town for Boring and Tesla and X, does building a town like Snailbrook figure into Elon Musk's business goals?"

Fishback responds by highlighting Musk’s motivation to attract and retain top talent by offering affordable housing and community amenities:

Price Fishback [10:06]: "One of the reasons why he's building this town, I believe, is because he wants to be able to attract and retain good workers."

Despite the current shortcomings, there remains potential for Snailbrook to develop into a vibrant community as Musk’s companies expand and the town attracts more residents. The establishment of facilities like a Montessori school, albeit currently underutilized, signifies steps towards creating a self-sustaining environment.

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Conclusion

The episode wraps up with reflections on the feasibility of Snailbrook meeting Elon Musk's utopian aspirations. While the initial stages reveal a town fraught with unfinished infrastructure and limited amenities, the historical context and expert insights suggest that with sustained investment and strategic planning, Snailbrook could evolve into a successful company town. However, challenges such as regulatory compliance and the need for more substantial infrastructure remain significant obstacles.

Noel King summarizes the episode, underscoring the complexities of building a modern company town in today’s economic landscape and questioning whether Musk’s vision can overcome the inherent difficulties observed during Ronnie Mola’s visit.

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Key Takeaways:

• Elon Musk's Ambition: Snailbrook is Musk's attempt to create a company town to support his expansive business ventures in Texas.

• Current Reality: The town is in its nascent stage, primarily consisting of temporary housing and basic amenities, falling short of Musk’s utopian vision.

• Historical Lessons: Company towns have a mixed legacy in America, with successes tied to good employer practices and failures often resulting from labor conflicts and overreach.

• Future Potential: With Musk's resources and commitment, there's potential for Snailbrook to develop into a thriving community, though significant challenges remain.

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Notable Quotes:

• Noel King [00:01]: "Snailbrook is not a town just yet. It is currently under construction outside of Austin."

• Ronnie Mola [00:31]: "It's got a lot of rough edges and it's definitely nothing that you would call like a utopia."

• Price Fishback [15:38]: "One of the major reasons they had [company towns] is isolation. You're just out in the middle of nowhere."

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Produced by Victoria Chamberlain. Edited by Matthew Collette. Engineers: Patrick Boyd and Andrea. Fact-checked by Laura Bullard. © Vox Media.

Transcript

[Noel King]

If you open your maps app and you type in Snailbrook, Texas, you will get nothing but a prompt. Do you maybe want Scenic Brook, Texas or Springbrook, Texas? Snailbrook is not a town just yet. It is currently under construction outside of Austin. The builder, one Elon Musk, says Snailbrook will be a company town for employees of his boring company and X and etc. He has plans for it to be, quote, utopian.

[Ronnie Mola]

Which, I mean, it's got a long way to go, it's got a lot of rough edges and it's definitely nothing that you would call like a utopia. So far it's just 15 trailers.

[Noel King]

Coming up on Today explained Elon Musk takes us back to the days of the company town. Whether we care to go or not.

[Ronnie Mola]

I don't see the draw personally to wanting to go out in the middle of nowhere and then live in a tiny trailer.

[Ryan Reynolds]

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[Noel King]

It's Today Explained. I'm Noel King. Ronnie Mola is a senior correspondent at Sherwood News who recently took a trip to Texas.

[Ronnie Mola]

So Elon Musk, you know, leader of like six businesses, has been steadily moving those businesses to Texas over the past few years.

[Price Fishback]

I'm excited to announce that we're moving our headquarters to Austin, Texas.

[Noel King]

The Boring Company has 20 jobs open in the Austin area. It's hiring for everything from engineers to accountants to crane oper.

[Price Fishback]

Musk has officially decided to move the X headquarters from San Francisco to Central Texas. Of course, several of his companies already have buildings here in Central Texas.

[Ronnie Mola]

It turns out that he wasn't really moving it to Austin, Texas. He was moving it to the county of Bastrop, this rural area in central Texas. It's about 45 minutes outside Austin, give or take on the traffic. And now he's been building this company town next to SpaceX and next to Boring Company and next to X. It's called Snailbrook, kind of in the middle of nowhere. It's supposed to be this sort of live work utopia.

[Price Fishback]

We're going to create an ecological paradise here on the. Because we're out on the Colorado River. It's going to be great.

[Ronnie Mola]

It's got like a center of commerce and, you know, different businesses and things like that. Different attractions for the workers. So I decided to go down there and check it out.

[Noel King]

Is Snail Brooklyn living up to Elon Musk's vision for it?

[Ronnie Mola]

Absolutely not. I mean, it's got a long way to go. When you get to Snailbrook, when you drive either from Austin or from Bastrop Town, all of a sudden you start seeing these giant buildings. And these are factories for Elon Musk's companies. There's the SpaceX Starlink facility, which is going to be over a million square feet. There's these metal buildings for the boring company. And then behind the boring company, behind this chain link fence that's obscured by these green slats, that's where the entire residence of the town is so far. There you'll find 15 or so gray and tan trailers, a little pool, a gym, and it's mostly empty most of the time. Then there's the center of commerce there. It's called Hyperloop Plaza. That's got two different giant metal buildings, kind of like you'd house livestock in. One of them is where the stores are. That's where the boring bodega is. I described it as sort of a tiny Whole Foods. You could get drinks with Adaptogens or the olive oil that everyone uses on Instagram.

[Noel King]

The squeeze bottle ones.

[Ronnie Mola]

The squeeze bottle ones. So there's also a pickleball court and a playground. It also appears to be residential grade playground stuff, so something you'd buy at Walma or Target. It's always broken. The locals were telling me, like when I was there, a ladder going up. One of the structures had been broken and they put a piece a 2x4 on it to kind of keep it together. There was a bolt coming out of another one, so it was like really shaky. You could shake the whole thing and you know, and you'd get sunburned because there's no sunshade. There's a candy shop for some reason in addition to the bodega, like as if you needed more snacks. His and hers barber shop. But I tried to get my hair cut but it wasn't open any of the times I was there. And I tried to make an appointment online and it said there were were not available. They're also building a pottery studio. This is an approximation of what I guess he thinks a town is like. There's going to be a doctor's office there, entertainment area which is really just a couple of TVs and some Nintendo Wiis. And you know, I just went and hung out in there.

[Noel King]

Are there people there?

[Ronnie Mola]

So not many, especially in the morning, not many people. It gets a little bit like slightly more trafficked around lunch and after work. As far as, you know, signs of life. Not too many, at least not yet.

[Noel King]

Is the idea that the town is under construction. We're still building it, but at some point people will move there. Like what is the actual plan to populate this place?

[Ronnie Mola]

I mean it's always hard to tell. You know, Elon Musk and his companies would not talk to me. SpaceX declined to comment and then boring company and X didn't respond to comments. Presumably they are going to eventually build those 110 single family homes that are not trailers. But in the meantime I've found other plans that show they're going to build another 20 homes. But those look like they're going to be trailers as well. You know, something you could throw up very quickly that isn't very permanent, that's cheap and easy, you know. He's also building a school there. There's a Montessori school that they finally got permits to open at long last. And you know, originally they said they were going to accept 50 students, they're only accepting 16. So like this is supposed to eventually be a place where the people who work at his companies can also live and go out with their kids and send their kids to school and you know, go get a beer afterwards or go to the food truck or go to maybe a restaurant or get primary care. But it's very much a work in progress and these things sort of take time. But Elon Musk has more money than God and you know, he started this back in around 20, 21. You know, if he wanted to he could put up some houses. You know, what was so interesting to me is I'm looking across from this broken playground, you know, with the two by four sistered against the ladder to keep it you know, to keep your kids from falling through. And across the way you see the Starlink facility where they're manufacturing satellites that go into outer space and that allow people around the world to get high speed Internet access. And to the other side of the playground is the boring company which is supposed to like, you know, it's tunneling company that, that hopes to do nothing less than quote, solve traffic and transform cities. So you've got these really like big ideas, big things happening and you know, and then just like a really rink a dink under baked town there.

[Noel King]

There is a long and very interesting history of company towns in America. I remember reporting from Oneida, the silverware maker a few years back. And what I recall were that there were these nice little houses that in the 40s and 50s and 60s the employees had owned. I they'd either got them at a really good price or been given them the 110 homes that Elon is building here. Is he incentivizing his workers by selling them at a good price? Like what, what is the, what is the advantage to living there?

[Ronnie Mola]

So we don't know yet. He hasn't built them, he hasn't said. We know that, we know that the, the trailers rent for about $800 a month, which is less than the median rent in the area. But it's also a lot less than you would get if you were paying the median rent in the area. Yeah, if you paid the median rent, you would get a nice house and not just, you know, a two bedroom trailer with not much else. So we don't know. I also visited some other company towns, including Endicott, New York, which was founded in the early 1900s for a shoe factory. And there they built these like really nice big houses for the workers there. And the workers could buy those houses at cost. And you know, they made thousands of these and it was really like a pretty successful company town. And partly I think that's because the workers were able to have and keep housing, you know, regardless of whether they worked at the shoe company. And a lot of those houses are still up to this day. And I think, you know, have just like stayed in families for generations and have really been important for, you know, the ongoing success of that town. So we don't know what Elon Musk would do with these 110 homes, whether he would sell them, whether what price they would be. But as it stands, you could pay a little bit less for the trailers, but you're also getting a lot less than you would in the rest of the area.

[Noel King]

So these days, in this economy, one can own and run a company and not build a town for the company. It's pretty common. Does building a town for boring and Tesla and X, does building a town like Snailbrook figure into Elon Musk's business goals?

[Ronnie Mola]

So one of the reasons why he's building this town, I believe, is because he wants to be able to attract and retain good workers. Right? You. You can't uproot your whole family and have them move across the country from California for nothing. It's one thing if you're saying you're going to Austin, which has a lot of cultural cachet and, you know, it's a known entity. It's another thing entirely if you're saying, let's go to the farm, this farmland in the middle of nowhere. So he's wanting to have draws. You know, okay, we have inexpensive housing, or we have this great Montessori school, or X, Y and Z. So I, I think part of that is to get people to work at his companies. Part of it might be just burnishing his own ego. You know, having your own town is a pretty big deal. Presumably someday, if this town does develop more, he could incorporate it and then, you know, the laws would be more on their side, even. But as it is, I mean, the regulation. Everyone told me that the regulations in Bastrop county are pretty lax. So, you know, he. He moved there because the regulations were less tough and stringent than they were in California. And. But even though they're lacks in. In Basarab county, he's still run up against them. Like, he's always fighting with the county because they're not, like, doing things in the correct order or not getting the correct permits, that sort of thing, or, you know, or dumping storm wastewater in the wrong place that, you know, that sort of thing. So even in this lenient environment, they've run up against the regulation.

[Noel King]

Do you think that Snailbrook has the potential of becoming a thriving town as it stands?

[Ronnie Mola]

I, you know, I wouldn't move to Snailbrook. Bastrop. The town is lovely. It's got all of this sort of, like, old west charm. It's a small town outside of Austin that's lively and fun. So Bastrop town I would consider moving to. I don't see the draw personally, to wanting to go out in the middle of nowhere and then live in a tiny trailer. I actually talked to one of Elon Musk's neighbors. It's this man who moved there about 10 years ago, and he has got a nice house on 10 acres. And since then, Elon Musk has moved in and bought property basically on three sides of him. And, and you know, he had this, like, it's up on a hill, it's, he's got this great view. But where he used to look at cows, he's now looking at SpaceX's Starlink facility, this big white monolith of a building. And you know, where you used to hear birds, you just hear constant beeping. I was interviewing him on the patio outside of his house and it was just incessant beep, beep, beep. So in a way, it's like the worst of all worlds. It's like, it's rural, but without the rural beauty. If you're living in Snailbrook and then it's absolutely not Austin, Texas, and it's not a quaint, charming downtown like Bastrop Town Island.

[Noel King]

Ronnie Mola of Sherwood news, coming up, 16 tons. And what do you get? The second half of the show. Of course.

[Phoebe Rios]

Support for Today Explained comes from Noom. Noom wants to remind you that the end of the year is on the horizon. And so if you made a New Year's resolution in, you know, Jan, like it's crunch time, they say, and yes, maybe you cheated, maybe you lost track. We're all human. But Noom wants you to know that, you know, if you started rebounding with junk food on that diet, you resolved to, you know, commit to it may have less to do with discipline and more to do with psychology. Ask Phoebe Rios, one of our colleagues here at Vox who tried Noom herself.

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[Noel King]

Why.

[Preet Bharara]

Do so many of us get happiness wrong and how can we start to get it right?

[Noel King]

I mean, I think we assume that happiness is about positive emotion on all the time, right? Often very high arousal, positive emotion. But that's not really what we're talking about.

[Preet Bharara]

I'm Preet Bharara and this week Dr. Laurie Santos joins me on my podcast Stay Tuned with Preet to discuss the science behind happiness. We explore job crafting the parenting paradox The Arrival Fallacy and why acts of kindness might be the simplest path to fulfillment. The episode is out now. Search and follow. Stay tuned with Preet Wherever you get your podcasts.

[Phoebe Rios]

This is TODAY Explained.

[Price Fishback]

So I'm Price Fishback. I am the Regents professor and APS professor of Economics at the University of Arizona.

[Noel King]

And you have some amount of specialty, I'm told, in company towns.

[Price Fishback]

I do. I wrote a dissertation and a bunch of articles about company towns and company housing and violent strikes and all sorts of things like that.

[Noel King]

Why were the heads of companies creating towns for their employees in the first place?

[Price Fishback]

Well, so there was a really nice article written in the Bureau of Labor Statistics bulletin back in 1919 by a guy named Leifer Magnussen. And so he'd done a survey of about 213 companies that had town. And so one of the major reasons they had and one talks about in the article is isolation, is you're just out in the middle of nowhere. And if you're out in the middle of nowhere, there's nobody else that's going to really come and build something. And if they do come and build something, like build housing or create a store, then they're gonna have pretty much monopoly and then you're gonna run into problems where they're gonna charge high prices and high rents and now you have to pay higher wages to get people to come.

[Noel King]

Huh.

[Price Fishback]

And so, you know, it was kind of made sense to vertically integrate the whole thing and just you're out in the middle of nowhere, you need housing, you need these things. And so let's just build it and bring them there.

[Noel King]

It's a lot of power for the company.

[Price Fishback]

Yes, it can be.

[Noel King]

And if the company is just trying to do the right thing and build housing so that they can get employees there. Okay, so how did things go right and how did things go wrong with the initial company towns?

[Price Fishback]

So you have all sorts of different types of employers. Some of them are very community minded and things like that, and they have other guys just trying to make money. And so the range of conditions in company towns was pretty wide. A lot of times they're trying to get started. So if they're trying to hire 100 employees or 200 employees, they need to build housing pretty quickly. And so it's usually pretty much the housing looks pretty much the same. They try to design the towns and things like that and then they try to improve things. The good employers try to put in things like YMCAs and swimming pools and they have a baseball team and things along those lines. But they also, you know, they're also providing the sewers and the store and the housing and. And also a lot of times they're providing the security as well.

[Noel King]

Are there any American towns that started as company towns? But we don't know that there are.

[Price Fishback]

Actually quite a few. Because usually what happens is that the town starts out as a company town and then say what happens is another mine moves in nearby, or maybe three or four mines moves by, move in nearby. And then what happens is you develop an independent town in and amongst all the company towns. And so that allows you to expand. And so probably a number of towns in West Virginia that weren't too deep into the mountains actually became independent towns, actually building off of the fact that there were several company towns around. And once you get that kind of situation, the company often sells off the housing.

[Noel King]

There are a couple of perils here. The company has a lot of power. The town is often isolated. In early American company towns, what sorts of negative consequences did we see?

[Price Fishback]

Well, I think one of the biggest problems is that the possibilities of labor strife go up.

[Noel King]

Oh, yeah.

[Price Fishback]

And one of the reasons is, if you just think about it, normally if you're mad at your grocer, you're mad at your grocer, but that doesn't influence your attitude towards your employer or your landlord or something like that. But if your landlord, your grocer and everybody else and the policeman are all hired by the company, and also the hospital or the medical doctors and stuff, well, then if you're mad at one, you're mad at everybody. Most of the towns actually didn't have bad experiences necessarily, but you do get situations where things just really go badly. Ludlow situation in Colorado in 1913 and 1914 was an example where Standard Oil owned the town. It was a coal mining town and things. And they actually was a pretty nice town, actually, if you look at it, they had a lot of nice amenities and things along those lines, because usually big companies actually provided better amenities. And then they started, they had a strike. And after about six weeks, the company wanted to bring in other workers, which meant that they pushed workers out of their houses. And so that's always a really bad situation, as you can imagine. And then you have like pickets and people are protesting and stuff. And you could be there and you could have a car backfire. And all of a sudden people start shooting. And then it goes really badly from there. And so then they had a situation where eventually they called in the troops, and the troops they actually ended up attacking a mining Tent town and like 13 women and children died in a fire. I mean, it was just horrible. That was known as the Ludlow Massacre. So that's kind of like the worst thing that can possibly happen.

[Noel King]

What are some examples of when it goes right and what tend to be the circumstances? When it goes right?

[Price Fishback]

I think the key to the circumstances goes right is that the employer is a good employer. And I think that happens in a lot of different cases. They actually, you know, they're paying wages above market wages. One of the things that they. That the employers liked about having the company town is that they thought they would get more stable employees. They attracted more married families and things like that. And so if you can get away from kind of a bad situation where everybody's a bachelor and they're moving around all the time, that's usually you can find those kind of towns and they have really lousy housing. But the ones that are relatively permanent sometimes lasted 50, 60, 70 years, just depended on how long the mine would last or how long the relationship would last. And Oneida worked well because, you know, it's kind of like a. It was a religious group and they were all pretty similar. So the more similar they were, the more likely they were to agree on everything that was going on. And I think the owners were the leaders. Matter of fact, the CEO probably was hired by a lot of the people who were running, who were employees of the town.

[Noel King]

It sort of seems at this point that company towns in 2024 couldn't really be that successful. But maybe I'm wrong. It seems like we have more choices now. We have cars now, so even if you're out in the boonies, you can drive to the city for work. Is this a thing independently of what's happening in Texas, which we'll talk about in a minute, is this a thing that still happens?

[Price Fishback]

I think so, to some degree. I mean, so you have mining towns, you still have mining operations here in Arizona and in other places. Right. And so. So they're opening up new mines and redoing old mines and stuff. And a lot of the towns around Southern Arizona, for example, they grew up relatively close to the mine, but weren't necessarily part of the mine itself. Tucson is close enough that you could commute from Tucson, commute from Nogales and other kind of places. And so having the automobile really helps. And then on top of that, I mean, particularly for something like SpaceX, where it's a lot of engineers and things, a lot of them probably can just zoom in or whatever and come in occasionally, it just depends on what they're actually producing on the site and what kind of skills those people need.

[Noel King]

Now, let me ask you a question. Elon Musk. A lot of what Elon Musk does is interesting for various reasons. He does seem to have an enormous ego. And so the idea that he's building a company town seems somewhat about the company and the need to do it and somewhat about him. Does a company town need a charismatic founder?

[Price Fishback]

I don't think it needs one. I mean, I think the better company towns, Rockefeller and Standard Oil and the steel companies and the number of coal companies, they had owners who were very religious and they felt like they were building a community and all sorts of things. And then it really hurt the reputations when you had these labor strife and things like that. But a lot of them felt like they were making their workers better off. They were paying above normal wages. Their rents were typically low in these places. And so you do have these charismatic people or people who believe that they're doing good things and they're helping their workers and doing things along those lines. And so I can see how Musk would kind of like to do that kind of thing. He seems to like to dabble in everything. I wish he'd just make better batteries so we can improve.

[Noel King]

Now, our reporter in the first half of the show, Ronnie Mola, tells us that at the moment, Snail Brook is not particularly impressive, not a particularly impressive place. But it's early stages. When you look at what Elon Musk does and is. Do you think that he could make this into something?

[Price Fishback]

Well, certainly. I mean, if he's really planning on having SpaceX be there for quite some time, I imagine they're going to build good quality housing. These days you can build good quality housing in nice neighborhoods and have it be variable as well. It depends on who he's trying to house and how expensive it is. And one of the questions is he building the housing and going to sell it, or is he going to build it and have people rent it? Then once the community is close enough to Austin that all sorts of other things are going on, then he'd sell the housing to people. Because that's typically what happens in those kind of settings. Well, I think the company town was really important for developing areas that were relatively isolated. And then what happens is in a number of places where the activity act expands and you have the same kind of things around it, or you have complementary industries that develop, then what happens is the company town becomes a thriving town. That's independent, they sell off the housing and everything goes along. So I think that that's a feature of it. It's not how every. How every place developed, but it's certainly how isolated places developed. I think.

[Noel King]

Price Fishback. He's a professor at the University of Arizona. Victoria Chamberlain produced today's show. Matthew Collette edited. Patrick Boyd and Andrea, Christine's daughter, are our engineers. And Laura Bullard is our fact checker. I'm Noel King. Welcome. It's Today explained.