Thread by @rachmonroe

This is a thread about what it’s like to be Elon Musk’s neighbor.

Briefly, Several years ago SpaceX moved some of its operations to Boca Chica, Texas, a small beach community of fixed-income retirees. They promised to be good neighbors. backstory here: esquire.com/news-politics/…

This quiet community by a wildlife preserve now had 24/7 construction, big trucks at all hours, bright lights at night, awful disruption.

What does this mean? A sheriff’s deputy bangs on your door at 10pm and tells you there’s a rocket test that night between 3-4am. Now, this is a mile from your house. And every previous rocket has blown up.

So you can either cross your fingers that nothing bad happens, or grab your pets and try to find somewhere safe to hunker down at night in the middle of the pandemic. This has happened nearly every night since May 3.

At the same time, the public beach — one of the only free open spaces in the area, which was described to me as “the poor ppl’s beach” (in a good way) is completely shut down while SpaceX is testing -- which has been pretty much constantly this entire month

In SpaceX’s original FAA filing, they claimed there would be a handful of tests a year, minimal disruption to local life (human & animal), rarely closing the beach, never on weekends. This was all, frankly, bullshit.

So: Elon is essentially taking over public resources (beaches, wildlife preserves) & other people’s property just bc he wants it, and Texas is not only permitting but encouraging him. (This state pretends to love private property, but it loves corporations more.)

Also infuriating -- SpaceX says residents have to move bc it's not safe for them to remain in Boca Chica. But as @DaveMosher has reported, the company was secretly planning to turn the whole (lovely!!!) area into a resort for employees intelligentliving.co/spacex-village…

It's infuriating. There are SO few places like Boca Chica left. It's beautiful, undeveloped, beloved by locals, part of a key wildlife corridor. A place where ppl w/out a lot of money can live near the beach. And Elon Musk has just taken it over because he wants it.

"Somebody else builds a house next to you and tells you to get out of your house--;ike, what the hell? . . . We’re going to fight that issue, because it is just fundamentally unfair." --Elon Musk in 2005 when SpaceX was temporarily booted from its CA launchpad by Lockheed Martin

To clarify, bc these tweets confused some people: I don't live next to SpaceX; I'm a journalist, describing the experience of one of my sources. I'm sorry for the confusion! Some folks who ARE there: @BocaChicaGal @BocachicaMaria1 @Bocachicagirl