Following his public disputes with California authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic, Elon Musk personally moved to Texas, outside of Austin, in 2020.
Over the next six years, he doubled down on the Lone Star State. In 2021, Musk increasingly focused the Starship program in South Texas, urging SpaceX employees to move there and work on the company’s future. In March of that year, he began using the name Starbase to describe the production and launch facilities near the Rio Grande River.
In 2023, he built a massive factory east of Austin to manufacture customer terminals and other electronics for the Starlink program. In July 2024, he announced that SpaceX would relocate its corporate headquarters from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas. He cited California’s regulatory and political environment as the motivating factor.
Since then, Musk has continued with major expansions of the Starbase facility. This summer, his company announced that Terafab, “the most epic-chip building effort in the world,” would be built in Grimes County, Texas, and that “a vertically integrated factory with more than 100 million square feet of manufacturing space is planned,” the company said . That’s right, 100 million square feet. This is equivalent to 1,700 American football fields, 15 Pentagons, or three Central Parks.
Everything is bigger in Texas, of course, and for a time, so was the bromance between Musk and Texas politicians. He has repeatedly said he loves Texas’ political climate, its regulatory environment, and the state’s Republican leaders. And in turn, they have loved him back. In July , Texas Gov. Greg Abbott praised Musk before interviewing him as a guest host of The Sean Hannity Show as “the leading visionary of our time. Thomas Edison. Just like that, maybe even bigger.”
During the 2026 midterms, Musk went all in on Republicans, investing nearly half a billion dollars in their election campaigns through his own America PAC and other organizations, according to The New York Times. Of this estimated $474 million, nearly half went to candidates in Texas.
