Enemy of the people: Elon Musk

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corporate shenanigans

In January, SpaceX granted Elon Musk, its founder and chief executive, a pay package that eventually totaled 1.3 billion restricted shares. The award was contingent on the rocket company’s establishing a colony on Mars with one million inhabitants and launching high-powered data centers into space.


Mr. Musk has not achieved those goals. Even so, he can vote those 1.3 billion shares in shareholder decisions, according to SpaceX’s offering prospectus, which was released on Wednesday. In other words, the company is allowing Mr. Musk to vote with shares he has not yet earned.


“I have never heard of this,” said Ann Lipton, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “He basically found a way to hack the normal rules of corporate organization.”

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spooky company town

The gleaming new city checks every box: school, medical center, recreational center, sushi bar. There’s even a dog park with hoops and climbing toys. But you and your dog are not welcome; “Private” warns the sign at its entrance. And don’t even think of stopping by for a tuna roll: The streets of black-and-white houses are blocked off by electronic access gates that encircle the city like a medieval moat. I watched a man who made the mistake of wandering inside the minimart get escorted out by armed guards in tactical gear.


In this town, almost every communal space is private property. A company controlled by the world’s richest man owns nearly all of it. He shapes its future.


This is Starbase, Texas, the city that Elon Musk built on America’s ragged hem at the southern border as the home for SpaceX, his aerospace and artificial intelligence company. Locals describe a highly secretive environment overseen by a company-affiliated city commission that rubber-stamps Mr. Musk’s vision, a place where even kindergartners are guided by his philosophies. Starbase is the newest manifestation of Mr. Musk’s political power. It is a beta test for a rising oligarchy that seems intent on transforming America from the inside out.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/o...core-ios-share

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Mr. Musk, who serves as SpaceX’s chairman, chief executive, chief engineer and chief technology officer, does not hold elected office in Starbase. I can’t see why he’d bother. The mayor and one commissioner are SpaceX executives; the other commissioner, a SpaceX spouse. The city election scheduled for last month was canceled because no one stepped up to challenge the current town officials.

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Starbase became a Texas city in May 2025, after an electorate made up overwhelmingly of SpaceX employees and their significant others voted 212 to 6 to incorporate. In June, electronic gates went up on every road leading into the village, barring the public from (technically public) streets.


One new Texas law makes interfering with Starbase’s operations potentially punishable with jail time. Another allows the company to shut down the beach and the highway into town at the mayor’s discretion. Another shields SpaceX, and by extension Starbase, from lawsuits by neighbors over nuisance caused by its rockets. The laws are so protective of Starbase that critics fear they could be wielded to criminalize any protests near it.

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Starbase’s darker realities are confided in whispers. Injury rates there far exceed the space industry average, according to a 2024 Reuters report. On May 15, Jose Luis Bautista Jr., a 25-year-old construction worker employed by an outside contractor, was killed in a dawn accident at the site where its Gigabay Starship assembly building is being erected. Brownsville’s fire chief told The San Antonio Express-News that an ambulance was dispatched to Starbase but turned around after SpaceX officials said their own emergency medical services were handling the accident. The incident is under investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which looks into workplace fatalities.

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There are a handful of non-SpaceX employees, including Mr. Pompa, who cling to their homes inside Starbase but outside the village. One longtime resident described how SpaceX bulldozers and heavy machinery have torn up the road to his home and made it hard to get to his property. But he hasn’t complained to the city. SpaceX’s people are in control, he said. If he speaks out against SpaceX, he fears the city could pass an ordinance that would create havoc for him. It’s like living in a dictatorship, he said.

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Trump, Musk and Rubio are genocidaires

Now, a new study published in The Lancet medical journal aims to quantify the human toll of those budget decisions – projecting that global aid cuts could lead to at least 9.4 million additional deaths by 2030, if the current funding trend continues. About 2.5 million of those deaths are projected to be children under the age of 5.


The peer-reviewed study, conducted by the Barcelona Ins ute for Global Health (ISGlobal) with funding from the Spanish government and the Rockefeller Foundation, modeled the outcome if aid cuts continue in line with recent averages and compared those figures to the deaths that would have occurred if aid had been maintained at 2023 levels. It drew on data from 93 low-income and middle-income countries that receive overseas development aid.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/04/world...-aid-cuts-intl