When they learned that Elon Musk had purchased 280 acres of land a short drive from their organic farm, it seemed like a miracle. For more than a decade, husband and wife Skip Connett and Erin Flynn had worked to turn Wilbarger Bend, a rural agricultural area located in a lush floodplain along the Colorado River about a half-hour drive southeast of downtown Austin, into a community-based farming hub like others around the country. Though they’d enjoyed some success over their five years of working the land, it had become apparent that their vision would require more money and more property. For years, Flynn had joked that what the couple needed was for a benevolent billionaire to drop out of the sky—someone who was willing to buy up some of the state’s best farmland before it turned into another subdivision and who wanted to provide the region with more healthy, affordable food. “When Elon Musk arrived, we thought, ‘Well, this is incredible!’ ” Flynn said during a recent tour of the Bastrop County farm, which lies about a mile from two of Musk’s newly arrived enterprises, SpaceX’s Starlink facility and the Boring Company. “His mother is a dietician and his brother, Kimbal Musk, is a restaurateur and proponent of the farm-to-table movement. We thought, ‘This is a family that understands the importance of good food and sustainable farming.’ ”
Like one of their new neighbor’s multimillion-dollar rockets, however, it didn’t take long for Connett and Flynn’s pandemic-era fantasy to come crashing down to earth. What seemed serendipitous at the time, they say, now appears more like a cruel twist of fate. Despite sending neighborly letters and reaching out through intermediaries, Connett and Flynn say neither Musk nor his brother has expressed any interest in collaborating with them to ensure the area’s devotion to farming is preserved. Instead, the couple and other local farmers say, three years after Musk’s purchase, the fertile land along the banks of the Colorado, shaded by pecan trees and frequented by bald eagles, is being transformed into an environmentally hazardous industrial park. What has long been a bucolic area marked by one-room churches, small family farms, and historic colonies settled by freed slaves is quickly becoming a place where, some locals say, profit takes precedence over conserving the past.
As the price of local land skyrockets and property taxes follow suit, in part because of Musk’s arrival, multigenerational farmers are being forced to offload family properties onto developers and gravel-mining companies that have descended upon the area to take advantage of the industrial boom ten miles west of downtown Bastrop. At least one ranch was recently sold to a California investor who buys property wherever Musk does, neighbors said. Rolling fields are being turned into a medley of chaotic construction sites, subdivisions, and multistory apartment complexes that are in juxtaposition to fields of grazing livestock.
To advocate for farmland preservation and call attention to what he and other locals consider reckless development practices that threaten the Colorado River, Connett in 2021 cofounded Friends of the Land, a grassroots coalition that monitors the environmental consequences of industrialization in western Bastrop County. “It’s almost like this thing just dropped out of the sky and nobody knew what to do with it,” says Connett, whose property is now surrounded by three mining operations that arrived after Musk, “and then it started growing, and taking over, before anyone knew what it was and how to contain it.”
Bastrop’s relatively inexpensive land and proximity to the river has long attracted outsiders hoping to profit from its unique location. Beginning in the 1830s, the county’s timber industry supplied cities such as San Antonio and Austin with lumber for construction. Over the next century, the local economy was dominated by lumber, cotton, and coal mining. African Americans flocked to the area in the years after emancipation, forming at least a dozen freedom colonies. By 1890, African Americans made up 43 percent of the county’s residents, roughly double what was then the state average, according to census records quoted by the Austin American-Statesman. More than 130 years later, the area’s African American population has dwindled, in part because of the skyrocketing cost of Central Texas land, which has prompted many longtime families to sell their properties. Connett and Flynn, in fact, purchased their land from an African American family that had been forced to sell.
The couple, who had launched a successful organic farm in East Austin in 2006, weren’t the only ones who saw the importance of Wilbarger Bend. In 2009, the same year they arrived, a coalition of Texas government agencies and environmental organizations published a comprehensive report recommending that, as Central Texas continued to grow, the area should be preserved because of its ecological sensitivity. Few could have anticipated that in barely more than a decade, Wilbarger Bend would become caught up in the schemes of one of the world’s richest men. “Mr. Musk has come in with the biggest splash we’ve ever had,” said Ken Kesselus, a local historian and former Bastrop mayor. “This area has attracted people from all over, but in the two-hundred-year history of this community, I don’t think anyone could’ve envisioned that someone with his ambitious vision would’ve settled in that particular location.”
Musk moved the Boring Company, which is housed inside an 80,000-square-foot warehouse, to the edge of Wilbarger Bend in 2021. By building underground tunnels, the Boring Company aims to transform cities by solving the problem of “soul-destroying traffic,” according to its website. Across the street, according to local property owners, another of Musk’s companies, SpaceX, occupies ninety acres along the Colorado River, where the company was recently dissuaded from pursuing a controversial plan to dump 100,000 gallons of treated wastewater into the river each day. The controversial mogul harbors aggressive plans to turn pastureland into a subdivision for workers and a former horse ranch into a Montessori school for the children of Musk’s employees. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, a state agency focused on protecting public health by reducing pollution, has slapped Musk’s properties with numerous environmental and building violation notices in recent years, several of which remain active. TCEQ has cited both Boring and SpaceX for bypassing the permitting process for air-quality and stormwater management. Neither representatives for SpaceX nor ones for the Boring Company responded to interview requests for this story, nor did legal representatives for Musk.
Feeling blindsided by the scope and pace of change around Wilbarger Bend, some neighbors have accused Musk of importing a “move fast and break things” mentality from Silicon Valley—a philosophy, they say, that is fundamentally at odds with small-town Texas. Locals feel that their environmental concerns are of little concern to Musk. Chap Ambrose, a forty-year-old Bastrop resident who lives adjacent to Musk’s properties, has meticulously logged each company’s alleged misdeeds on his website, Keep Bastrop Boring. Among those wrongdoings: when the Texas Department of Transportation announced plans to add turn lanes to some local roadways, the Boring Company pushed back, claiming the lanes were unnecessary due to traffic flow and the frequency of truck deliveries, which, it argued, didn’t pose a hazard to motorists. “They’re fighting every agency that is trying to make their arrival go smoothly,” said Ambrose, “and making this way harder than it has to be.”
During casual interactions with employees of the Boring Company, Ambrose and other locals claim they were asked to sign nondisclosure agreements—another import from California tech culture. Some locals say violations, such as failing to receive proper permitting for air and stormwater protections, continue because the county’s engineering and development department, which inspects new construction, is understaffed and unable to keep up with the pace of construction. Ambrose believes there’s another factor at play: county officials are intimidated by their powerful new neighbor, whose companies routinely ignore local regulations.
Earlier this year, the Boring Company began construction on the Colorado River Connector Tunnel at the Tesla factory in Austin, which would, it appears, privately connect the automotive plant to a new Boring Company warehouse a few miles away. After Ambrose filed a complaint with TCEQ in April that white liquid was spilling from the tunnel, agency investigators found that the Boring Company had not applied for an air permit before construction began—a major violation that can warrant fines and penalties as high as $25,000 a day. Two years ago this month, TCEQ cited the Boring Company for a violation of state regulations after neighbors complained that it had begun its tunneling operation in Bastrop without an air permit, a certification that is required for certain kinds of construction that involve emissions. Investigators said Boring was not penalized for that violation because the company was new to Texas and had no history of noncompliance in the state.
In this case, the air permit was required per federal guidelines because of the on-site concrete and grout batch production used to seal and stabilize the tunnel’s concrete forms. “Without more serious consequences, what’s going to stop this company from disregarding [Environmental Protection Agency] regulations?” Connett said. Ambrose agreed and went a step further, suggesting that the company’s behavior could jeopardize the the Colorado River. “A corporation that’s been tunneling for six years can’t claim ignorance to environmental and safety protections,” he said, referring to the amount of time the company has been constructing tunnels at sites around the country. “We continue to see them fail at the basics and put their employees, neighbors, and public water at risk. I think that’s going to be a problem as they try to build public support for public infrastructure projects.”
Despite his frustrations, Ambrose considers himself a fan of Musk’s interstellar ambitions and is on a waiting list for a Tesla Cybertruck. Like other locals, he isn’t inherently opposed to the area’s tech transformation—nor to Musk himself. David Barrow, the owner of Eden East Farm (which this magazine wrote about in 2021), said most folks in Bastrop couldn’t care less about what Musk does on the social media platform X. They appreciate the jobs Musk has brought to the county and the money SpaceX and Tesla employees inject into the local economy.
But what the newcomers may not realize, Barrow said, is that while Texans prize rugged individualism, they also care deeply for their neighbors—and they expect that care to be reciprocated. Bastrop, he said, has always embodied both values simultaneously. “We just want them to be good neighbors,” he said, referring to Musk’s newly arrived companies. “They need to follow the rules now and not ask for forgiveness later.”
Some locals say that Musk’s business practices aren’t their chief concern. They worry more about the gravitational pull his operations exert, bringing in a flurry of activity that upends rural life. To supply the Boring Company, SpaceX, and Tesla with concrete, multiple sand and gravel mines have opened in the area in recent years, clogging county roads with hundreds of industrial trucks each day. Over the past decade, gravel mines—which are used to supply the raw materials for building homes, highways, and new facilities, such as Tesla’s global headquarters, in Austin—have exploded in number across environmentally sensitive parts of the Central Texas Hill Country.
Wilbarger Bend now hosts at least three mining operations (though there are now six in the immediate area), some of which include rock-sorting machines that jut into the sky, unleashing plumes of dust into the air. Three of those mines have opened since 2022 and now occupy more than a thousand acres along the Colorado River near the Utley Bridge, a location that has long been a favorite spot for anglers and kayakers.
Residents say the trucks that come and go from the mines often move at high speeds, damaging roads and bridges, endangering other motorists, causing noise pollution, and leaving plumes of dust in their wake. The air quality is not being monitored, and area residents say nobody has done an assessment to determine how neighborhoods are being affected. In one heavily Latino neighborhood, some locals argue that dust particles and motor vehicle pollution have made bus stops along formerly quiet county roads unsafe for children. “The conditions on Wilbarger Road that we witnessed are unacceptable,” said Susana Almanza, the executive director of People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources, an environmental-justice organization based in East Austin. “Families, but especially children, should not be exposed to this level of air pollution from dust. The fact that this is happening to Latino families makes this a classic case of environmental racism.”
At Connett and Flynn’s farm, early morning birdsong has been replaced by the rumble of large rock-sorting machines, which come to life at 6 a.m. most days, sometimes earlier. Next door, giant mounds of earth dug from gravel mines seem to grow in size with each passing day. Though the machines turn off after dark, bright lights from Musk’s nearby operations often illuminate the night sky, making sleep difficult for neighbors. “You can’t really escape the sound, no matter where you are on the property,” Flynn told me during a recent tour of her land, which borders a peaceful, winding stretch of the Colorado upstream from Musk’s properties. There was a time, not too long ago, when this area was being marketed as an agritourism destination, a place for urban residents to retreat to on the weekends to pick wildflowers and buy produce. Down the road from Connett and Flynn’s property, Barton Hill Farms did exactly that, luring thousands of visitors each month to its meadows along the river to cut giant sunflowers, take photos with livestock, and listen to live music in the shade of towering cottonwood trees.
Though Barton Hill Farms was a local fixture for more than a decade, the business’s owners didn’t own the land. Last year, after the land’s owner, Bettie Buchanan, leased the land to a mining company called Travis Materials, the farm’s colorful wildflower fields and walking trails were destroyed to prepare the land for mining, upsetting many locals who considered the farm a model for enhancing the local economy without harming the area’s natural beauty. Nearby, on another part of Buchanan’s property, miners have peeled back the top layer of soil, transforming a formerly green pasture lined by oak trees into a muddy pit crisscrossed by tire tracks. At the center of the pit, a small plot of land—home to a 29-grave African American cemetery that dates to the nineteenth century—remains untouched, but visiting requires walking across private property and a construction area, a trek that some consider intimidating. On the mining company’s maps, the cemetery is listed as a “work area.” Relatives, many of whom come from families with long generational ties to the land, say they used to be able to visit the graves whenever they wanted, but now they’re required to make an arrangement in advance with Travis Materials, which closely monitors the length of their visits.
Louise Barnes, who has parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents buried in the Barton Hill Cemetery, called the altered landscape “disturbing.” “That’s my relatives’ final resting place, and you would think it would be a peaceful place for us to visit,” she said. “I’d like to have one hundred percent access and to see it cleaned up and preserved so that it looks like a cemetery should look.”
Reached by phone, Mike Weynand, the owner of Travis Materials, said reports about the lack of access were “complete bullshit” and were being stirred up by “agitators.” “The people who have relatives in that graveyard have always had access and know exactly who to talk to if they want to visit,” he added.
Buchanan, 77, whose family has owned the land since 1854, echoed Weynand’s sentiments and said that family members, for the most part, stopped visiting the graveyard in the late 1980s, a claim that some local residents and family members dispute. Complaints about accessing the graves only began, she said, when the mining companies arrived. “They don’t like the mining trucks and they don’t like progress,” she said. “If I’d invented a round wheel they’d want to go back to a square one.”
For the first few decades of Bastrop’s existence, the Indigenous population violently opposed the encroachment of Mexican and European settlers onto its lands. Wilbarger Bend is named after Josiah Pugh Wilbarger, a 31-year-old farmer who was scalped by Comanches in 1833 while surveying land a few miles from present-day Austin. Though he survived the attack and would live for another eleven years, his wounds never fully healed.
Nearly two hundred years later, the rich, alluvial soil outside Bastrop is once again the scene of a clash between new and old. Kesselus, the local historian, believes these conflicting forces will eventually learn to coexist. He pointed out that Bastrop started out as a Mexican settlement and later became majority Anglo. The community, he said, endured the Civil War, slavery, and the century of racial segregation that followed. In more recent decades, the area has absorbed Mexican immigrants and transplants from all over the United States, most recently from California. “In Bastrop, we can learn to live with anyone,” he said. “We know how to incorporate outsiders into our community.”
Still, Connett, Flynn, and many of their neighbors will need convincing. It’s not that they can’t learn to coexist with outsiders. The question, they say, is how to live alongside outsiders that demonstrate so little regard for the land they’re inhabiting and the river that has made Bastrop a destination for the past two hundred years. “Elon likes to say he’s going to create an ecological paradise wherever he sets up shop,” Connett said. “Well, this area already was an ecological paradise before he showed up.”
