To Starbase and Beyond: SpaceX Gets a Town of Its Own
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Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, May 6th. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. Three, two, one, ready for incorporation. Elon Musk's rocket-building town gets the green light from voters to make a slice of southeastern Texas its own self-governing municipality. What's it mean for SpaceX?

Then, a new era in freedom. That's how our reporter describes the mood at Token 2049, a cryptocurrency conference, nay party, in Dubai, where industry insiders and their biggest fans gathered last week. We'll take you there.

But first, 212 to 6. In favor. That was the final tally of a weekend vote on whether to forge ahead in making Starbase its own fully functioning town. It's a section of land near Brownsville, Texas, where Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX has launch facilities and production sites. It's where the company builds the Starship rockets for deep space missions. And there's also housing there for people who work at those facilities.

So what exactly does the vote mean for SpaceX and this sliver of Cameron County? And do the neighbors approve? Wall Street Journal reporter Micah Maidenberg covers the business of space. Micah, SpaceX hasn't really said a whole lot about what it wants to do with Starbase from here. But why does it want the area to be a town in its own right rather than just a place the company operates? So what's happened is like all this SpaceX property, including homes for employees and

all this launch and rocket infrastructure is now inside this town. It wasn't as of just a few days ago. And part of it for SpaceX is like building up this workforce at this site.

The idea is you can more rapidly or streamline the process to develop amenities for current and future staff that are going to be building these complex and enormous vehicles that SpaceX is launching from Starbase. That's part of it. And that came in a letter that one of the top executives at SpaceX sort of on the ground in South Texas sent.

sent to county officials late last year. She also said that there are some kind of civil or traditionally governmental tasks, if you will, that the company is now handling that would be better managed by a public entity. Is there a slight hiccup for Starbase as a municipality, though? Because Texas Code has a provision that bars conflicts of interest from

from those who run these cities if they also receive benefits from the companies themselves, too, in this case SpaceX. We'll see how that plays out. As a municipality with elected officials, all of those folks are going to have to follow local government code and statutes on everything from open records to posting meeting times for official meetings, etc.

to fall in conflict of interest rules. The three people that were elected to oversee Starbase, the town, all have ties to SpaceX. And I'm sure all three of them are thinking about how to navigate what's required in Texas state code and particularly around those conflicts of interest questions.

Back in 2023, after a visit to Starbase, you wrote that pretty much everyone can agree on one thing, that Starbase is disruptive. So now, a year and a half later, what's the mood like there? Does this effort to make Starbase official have support from the locals around it more so maybe than it did before? Just to take a little bit of a quick step back, this corner of Texas, Cameron County, Texas, is in the very far southeastern tip of the state.

And where Starbase has been developed over the years, for many, many years, for decades, was pretty empty. There had been some housing development and some folks were living out there, but it was basically a natural area with...

a public beach that a lot of folks used in the region. And SpaceX industrialized the landscape, so to speak, built this enormous factory, added other production sites, and added testing facilities for really powerful rockets.

And that's upset a lot of people. There are folks that are really frustrated with beach closures. There are folks that claim SpaceX is not a good steward of the local environment. SpaceX pushes back on that idea very strongly.

And then there are a lot of people, look, in Cameron County who are working at SpaceX and who have businesses that are tied to Starbase. And those economic opportunities have generated a lot of support from a lot of people in the region, in the county, and among elected officials.

Starbase, again, more broadly, is part of the Rio Grande Valley, which historically has been among the poorest in the country. And there are a lot of folks and a lot of elected officials who are very eager for

locals to get training, get jobs, and work on what's meant to be a real path-breaking space vehicle. So this relationship is complicated. Yeah. And the thing is, this is also a growth story. SpaceX wants to do more launches at the site. They want to build more rockets. We'll be watching to see how that relationship between

the company, the new town, and the broader community in Cameron County and the Rio Grande Valley evolves. That was WSJ reporter Micah Maidenberg there. Coming up, from U.S. public enemies to celebrity status. We'll take you to a crypto event in Dubai where enthusiasm for the industry and its executives is sky high as a U.S. crackdown goes in reverse. That's after the break. This is a CRM Meltdown.

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To a finance event in Dubai we go, but not just any finance event. Token 2049 was a star-studded crypto industry party where last week the champagne flowed, people flew overhead on zip lines, and industry high flyers, once the targets of U.S. regulators, were treated as celebrities. Ladies and gentlemen, do we have any fans of CZ now? Yeah!

And oh, were there fans of CZ, that's Chengpeng Zhao, founder of the crypto exchange Binance. He served four months in prison and paid a record $4.3 billion fine to the U.S. for allowing terrorists, drug traffickers, and sanctioned actors to move billions of dollars through his platform. But that only added to CZ's appeal for one fan, who our reporter Angus Barak caught up with at the event. CZ is a legend.

A legend, as the man calls him. Angus, CZ wasn't the only crypto executive in attendance at this event in Dubai. Who else was there? Yeah, so Token 2049 depicts itself as the biggest crypto event in the world. There were 15,000 people who attended. They paid up to $5,000 to be there.

And, you know, they were mainly there because the biggest, most powerful kind of richest people in the crypto industry all showed up to give talks as well. There was Changpeng Zhao, or CZ, the founder of Binance. He was in a U.S. jail until only six months ago. There were the CEOs of Tether and the founder of Tron.

You'd both been under significant amount of pressure under the previous administration. Eric Trump turned up along with the son of President Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff.

The two of them are running the Trump family's own Cripso Venture, World Liberty Financial. So, yeah, it was kind of an incredible mix of characters from all over the industry. CZ, Justin Sun, Paolo Ardoino, Arthur Hayes. The industry views these figures as people that have been put under a lot of pressure by the government and have emerged at the other end. And they have these kind of Robin Hoods.

personas. And you know, at the conference, for instance, with CZ, people are pursuing him for photos.

They had to close off the main stage area where he was speaking because so many people were desperate to hear him talk. I mean, they're superstars within the community. And as you're alluding to there, this is quite a stark difference from the mood that's really gripped the industry over the last couple of years, certainly in the last year when the U.S. was quite aggressively trying to rein in the crypto industry. This event, as you've described, was a who's who of crypto executives caught up in lawsuits and allegations online.

of illegality over the last couple of years. What's really changed for the industry now? The biggest thing that changed is that President Trump came into power on a platform that he was going to unshackle the crypto industry of all the regulations, which in the industry's view had been thwarting its growth in the US. And so far, he's lived up to those expectations to a great degree. He's been dismantling, redirecting the

specific kind of law enforcement agencies that had been targeting particular crypto companies.

He's also been granting pardons to a number of high profile crypto figures, including Arthur Hayes, who was the co-founder of a crypto exchange called BitMEX. Arthur Hayes was also at this conference. At one point, he took to a zip line that was running over the outdoor area to shout, everybody should be buying Bitcoin at this very second. So, yeah, you know, the industry, they're in a very kind of jubilant mood at the moment. All the kind of obstacles that they have been facing have been

largely torn down, and they don't see any sign of that changing, at least under the current administration. You mentioned the current administration, and you mentioned Eric Trump's presence at this conference, too. The Trump family seemed to have been a pretty big draw among attendees. Yeah, certainly. In terms of kind of industry participants, the Trump family's entrance into the crypto market is probably the most drastic change over the last kind of six months. World Liberty Financial, they're being very proactive in

striking business deals with other members of the industry, including companies that have had a lot of kind of legal and kind of criminal problems in the past. They've launched their own stablecoin, which is a cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar. And of course, this has led to a lot of concern about the conflicts of interest, which now exist between when you have the president's family doing business with companies that have a huge incentive to

clean up their previous legal problems. What has the White House said about President Trump's involvement or perceived involvement in the cryptocurrency industry himself? Well, Liberty Financial is run by Eric Trump and Zach Witkoff and a number of others. So the company says that President Trump doesn't have a direct role in the running of the company.

The president also divested his assets into a trust which is being run by his children, which, as a White House spokesman told us, means that there are no conflicts of interest. That was Angus Barak, a WSJ reporter covering crypto, financial crime and markets. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with Deputy Editor Chris Sinsley. I'm Victoria Craig for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TMB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

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