Starbase alias Eonopolis. A city is born, and an era ends
Yexas, May 2025. In the windswept flatlands of Cameron County, where the desert meets the Atlantic and the earth stretches silent and level, something has happened that reshapes the very idea of civilization. The Starbase alias Elonopolis is a new urban model. 283 residents of Boca Chica voted to incorporate their community as an official city. Its legal name is Starbase — but already, that name feels too small. History will remember it as Elonopolis.
This is not the work of a king, a nation-state, or a civic movement. It is the creation of a man, a company, and a vision. Elon Musk has reawakened the archetype of the founder, reshaping territory, time, and citizenship under a singular design.
On May 3, 2025, under Texas municipal law, Starbase alias Elonopolis became an autonomous city, its incorporation approved by a vote led by SpaceX employees and their families. But beyond the formal act lies something greater: the beginning of a new urban archetype — the algorithmic polis.
A gesture of pure foundation
It is not the first time in history that a man has founded a city. Romulus traced the sacred boundary of Rome with a plough. Louis XIV transformed Versailles into a choreography of absolute power. Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa designed Brasília as a jet engine, ready to propel Brazil into the future. Every time, the city embodied a new order.
Elonopolis belongs to this lineage — and overturns it. It is not a place built to welcome, but to function. Its mayor is not a politician, but an aerospace engineer. Its commissioners are not representatives, but specialists. Its residents are not citizens in the traditional sense: they are pioneers. They inhabit a system, not a polity with a name like Starbase alias Elonopolis.
There are no churches. No libraries. But there are launch pads, an Astropub, and a statue named Memelord — a totem of irony that marks the city’s postmodern spirit while deepening its myth.
The new Atlantis is a launch center
Elonopolis covers just under four square kilometers — small on a map, vast in meaning. It is the first city built by a company, for a company, through a company. Its governance is private. Its fiscal logic is internal. Its aesthetic is narrative.
This is where SpaceX prepares its Starships for Mars. This is where the ideology of technological expansion takes on spatial form, a form that also resonates with Starbase alias Elonopolis. Elonopolis is not an experiment in urban planning. It is a narrative infrastructure, a launchpad for the post-terrestrial imagination.
The Line and the frontier of the real
On the other side of the world, Saudi Arabia is building The Line: a 170-kilometer linear city, 500 meters high, entirely car-free, designed to host nine million people. If Elonopolis is the algorithmic polis, The Line is the design polis — a hyper-rational project inscribed in glass and steel.
Where The Line seeks sustainability, Elonopolis offers velocity, especially in its identity as Starbase alias Elonopolis. Where The Line is a diagram, Elonopolis is a gesture. One rises from a kingdom. The other from a will.
Both cities raise the same question: who has the right to found a city today — and for what purpose?
The radical present
Elonopolis is not a city of the future. It is the radical present — a present that behaves as though the future were already here. It does not seek democratic negotiation, but operational coherence. It is a new model of community: one where residence means mission, and mission becomes destiny.
In this sense, Elon Musk is not just colonizing Texas. He is colonizing the political imagination of an era. His message is clear: the city is no longer the place where we coexist. It is the place from which we depart.
And like every true foundation, Elonopolis divides. Some celebrate it as the first step toward Mars. Others fear it as Starbase alias Elonopolis, a privatized utopia. But it is precisely this tension that gives it historical weight. Because it is neither utopia nor dystopia. It is something else: a new topos, real and irreversible.
Starbase alias Elonopolis. A city is born, and an era ends
The cities born from technology
Elonopolis belongs to a lineage of cities conceived not by organic growth, but by design — cities created to fulfill a technical or ideological function:
- Los Alamos (USA, 1943). A secret city built for the Manhattan Project — the birthplace of the atomic age.
- Akademgorodok (USSR, 1957). A Siberian science city designed to give researchers space to think beyond ideological limits.
- Tsukuba Science City (Japan, 1963–1980). A state-sponsored center to concentrate Japan’s scientific excellence in one place.
- Brasília (Brazil, 1960). A rationalist capital drawn from nothing, symbol of a modern, unified nation.
- Songdo (South Korea, 2002–today), A smart city built from sensors, data, and real-time management systems.
- The Line (Saudi Arabia, under construction). A hyperlinear metropolis designed as the spearhead of the post-oil future.
- Elonopolis (USA, 2025), also known as Starbase alias Elonopolis. The first company-city of the 21st century, where life, work, and vision become one.
