Billionaire Elon Musk’s companies are transforming Austin. The clean-energy mogul is putting a green halo over a state synonymous with oil and gas, and the electric car entrepreneur has pledged to bring jobs and economic prosperity. But a closer look at his businesses shows that Musk’s ambitions are more comprehensive than the horizon and the planet.
He is a force of nature with many ideas that are often contradictory. He is a proponent of more babies, for example, but also of batteries. He has a long-held goal of building enormous battery factories, not just the little ones that power Tesla cars.
As the owner of several sprawling companies, he is often busy, and some of his comments may be seen as reckless or off-base. But the X CEO is still one of the most visible people in the tech sector, and his opinions carry weight. So when he declared that the migrant crisis “will destroy New York,” it was a warning that should have been heeded.
On Wednesday, Mr Musk demanded “preventive action” in a post on X (formerly Twitter), claiming that about two million people enter through the US border yearly. According to the US Center for Countering Digital Hate, this is far higher than the official count, which stands at less than 100,000 a year. The X CEO also said that people from every country on Earth are coming through the Texas border, and the US government is not doing enough to stop them.
This came as an overwhelmed city in Texas declared an emergency, deploying National Guard troops to help with border security. The mayor, Rolando Salinas, said 7,200 people had illegally crossed the border the previous week. The city is running out of beds, and officials warned that schools, hospitals, and other services could be affected if the situation worsens.
In the tech world, it is common to work from home, but it is a little harder for service workers to do so without getting paid. That tension was brought into sharp relief this week when CNBC’s David Faber asked Tesla CEO Elon Musk to respond to a question about Silicon Valley “laptop classes” who have been issued return-to-office mandates. Musk responded that the “laptop class” should get off its “moral high horse and stop acting like a bunch of hypocrites.”
From his perch in Giga, Texas, which sits on a formerly vacant strip mall in West Lake Hills, Holm sees that master plan at play. The site is becoming the headquarters for SpaceX, Tesla, and The Boring Company. All of these are growing, which he believes will be necessary for a future when an Austin evening looks like this: After signing off from your Elon job, you take a quick tour to San Antonio in your electric Tesla at 150 miles an hour. You skip the exurban maze by traveling underground in a hyperloop tunnel built by Elon.
