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Building outside an existing town means Mr. Musk gets to be in charge, which has long appealed to rich people who don’t want to be restrained by democratic checks and balances. Les Wexner, the former chief executive of L Brands, created a town of mansions to surround his own mansion in the Columbus bedroom community of New Albany, Ohio. Before he became king of England, Charles oversaw the construction of an ersatz antebellum town, Poundbury, to underscore his view that his country took a terribly wrong turn somewhere around World War II. The Italian designer Brunello Cucinelli renovated the hilltop village of Solomeo as a kind of fashion show.
Mr. Musk does seem to have enjoyed exercising his naming rights. Snailbrook is named for Gary, the official snail of the Boring Company, a tunneling company that is one of Mr. Musk’s less successful ventures, which has a workshop nearby. Company towns are often named for their owners — Alcoa; Hershey, Pa.; Steinway Village, N.Y., in Queens — but one can surely sympathize with Mr. Musk’s decision not to call his town Boring.
Yet the initial plans are strikingly devoid of the utopian aspirations and showmanship that characterize most of Mr. Musk’s ventures. He’s just planning to build a few rows of low-cost homes in the middle of a field. The Wall Street Journal, which first reported Mr. Musk’s plans, said one building would house a small Montessori school.
The real benefit of building outside an existing municipality is that cities and towns, particularly in desirable areas, increasingly operate as private clubs devoted to preventing development. Last year Vail Resorts announced plans to build subsidized housing for 165 workers in Vail, Colo., where the average home costs well more than $1 million. The town responded by invoking eminent domain and moving to seize the property to prevent construction. The town’s mayor, Kim Langmaid, says the proposed housing would cause bighorn sheep to starve.
It’s hard to know how seriously to take Mr. Musk, who has a long history of dreaming out loud. He previously suggested that he might seek to establish a city around SpaceX Starbase, his rocket-launching facility outside Brownsville, Texas. In a March 2021 tweet, Mr. Musk declared that he was “creating the city of Starbase, Texas.” He added, “From thence to Mars, and hence the Stars.”
(Mars, as you may recall, is another place where Mr. Musk plans to build a city.)
Still, while Snailbrook doesn’t exist in any legal sense, the idea has progressed beyond mere tweeting. There are already a few houses on the ground and a recreation center. In Texas, as soon as a community has 201 residents, it can petition to incorporate as a town.
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