Elon Musk is famous for having big, outlandish ideas. His latest: building his own city in Texas.
According to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, Musk-owned entities have been buying up land — at least 3,500 acres of it — near Austin, Texas, and are in the process of trying to incorporate a town called “Snailbrook.” The name, apparently, is a reference to the snail mascot for another Musk venture, The Boring Company.
The idea behind Snailbrook is that Musk’s employees would live and work there. Essentially, it’s an extension of a practice that many modern tech companies already engage in, outfitting their offices with lots of amenities in order to encourage the employees to never leave work.
In this case, tying housing directly to employment would mean that the workers would literally never leave — unless they went on vacation or were fired. In the latter case, they would reportedly have 30 days to vacate their homes.
The plan harkens back to the idea of “company towns,” popular among coal companies and the like in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Company towns were not known as particularly nice places to live, to put it mildly, and fell out of fashion after workers gained some rights during the New Deal.
The planned town has been described as “utopian” and “futuristic” in reporting, though it is not yet clear what it would specifically offer its residents. That said, employees would be offered below-market rates for rent.
In other, potentially even more utopian Elon Musk-related news, Tesla’s electric pickup truck, Cybertruck, is set to go into production this summer, finally reaching consumers sometime next year. The truck, which doesn’t have a price tag yet, already has an astonishing 1.5 million pre-orders.
Also, Musk recently agreed to open a portion of Tesla charging stations to all EV users — a genuinely laudable move, depending on how significant that “portion” actually ends up being.
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