Musk's Texas ties: the SpaceX move and millions for Republican campaigns

Elon Musk, the billionaire who owns the space company SpaceX and runs its Starlink satellite internet service, has spent six years concentrating his business in Texas. Technology outlet Ars Technica examines what that means now that the state's political picture has shifted. Its headline refers to a Democratic "blue wave" in Texas, though the excerpt provided does not detail the election results.

The move to Texas

After public disputes with California authorities during the COVID-19 pandemic, Musk moved personally to Texas in 2020, outside Austin. In 2021 he increasingly focused the Starship rocket program in South Texas and urged SpaceX employees to relocate there. That same year he began calling the production and launch facilities near the Rio Grande River Starbase. In 2023 he built a large factory east of Austin to make Starlink customer terminals and other electronics.

In July 2024 Musk announced that SpaceX would move its corporate headquarters from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas, citing California's regulatory and political environment. This summer the company announced Terafab, a chip-making project in Grimes County, Texas, with more than 100 million square feet of planned manufacturing space. That is equivalent to about 1,700 American football fields.

Political backing

Musk has repeatedly said he likes Texas' political climate, its regulatory environment and its Republican leaders. In July, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, before interviewing Musk on The Sean Hannity Show, called him "the leading visionary of our time."

In the 2026 US congressional midterms, Musk invested about $474 million in Republican campaigns through his America PAC and other organizations, according to The New York Times. Nearly half of that went to candidates in Texas.