Elon Musk's SpaceX employees file petition to incorporate small Texas community into official town

Employees of Elon Musk's company SpaceX recently filed a petition to turn a small community the company built in Texas to become its own town.  © Anna Moneymaker / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP

According to a new report from The New York Times, Musk has been expanding the company in Texas in recent years, building various factories, warehouses, and manufacturing plants.

In Boca Chica, the company has created a roughly 1.5 square mile sized home base, where around 500 employees, 219 primary residents, and over 100 children reside in refurbished company-owned homes and temporary housing.

The community has everything from a restaurant and schools to medical facilities and a launch pad where the company fires off its rockets.

In the past month, employees gathered signatures and filed a petition to hold an official election for leadership, as they are attempting to incorporate the community into a town called Starbase.

A woman living in the community, whose husband works for SpaceX, told the Times that she's hopeful the petition passes, as she believes their community is "a model of what new cities should be."

She continued, saying, "If all goes through with this petition, my baby might be the first child born in this city. It would be pretty epic!"

Alan Bojorquez, a lawyer who specializes in helping groups of Texas residents incorporate towns, told the Times that these groups "want to prevent their area from being gobbled up by an expanding city, or to keep a particularly undesirable business from moving in."

Incorporation would allow Starbase to create municipal utility systems, be eligible for state and federal grants, and be allowed to create police and fire departments. At most, the city would have to handle maintaining its roads.

Bojorquez also noted that he had never helped a company go through such a process for employees, and it is unclear what Musk or SpaceX stand to gain from incorporating.