Elon Musk says he has a hard time convincing engineers with families to move into his “monastery”.
Elon Musk, pictured on February 1, 2026 upon arrival at Mar-a-Lago with Shivon Zillis, one of the mothers of his children, PHOTO: Mark Schiefelbein / AP / Profimedia Images
SpaceX and Tesla launched in California before moving their headquarters to Texas, a move that CEO Elon Musk says has created hiring difficulties, according to Business Insider.
Musk says married techies, engineers and scientists have had trouble bringing their families to certain parts of the southern US state. The biggest problem is at SpaceX's launch site and headquarters in South Texas, known as “Starbase.”
“I tell the life partner the problem,” Musk said during a nearly three-hour podcast interview hosted by tech journalist Dwarkesh Patel and entrepreneur John Collins, co-founder of payments platform Stripe. “For Starbase this was particularly difficult because the chances of finding a job outside of SpaceX are pretty slim,” Musk pointed out.
He was referring to the fact that Starbase, where SpaceX has been building and testing rockets since 2019, is located in a sparsely populated area of Texas near the US-Mexico border. It is located across from a largely undeveloped area under the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
Elon Musk compares SpaceX headquarters to a 'technology monastery'
The Starbase campus is about a 40-minute drive from Brownsville, the closest city, according to Google Maps. Brownsville has a population of about 187,000, according to the most recent US Census data.
That isolation stands in stark contrast to SpaceX's former headquarters in El Segundo, California, minutes from Los Angeles and part of one of the nation's largest labor markets.
“It's like a sort of monastery of technology,” Musk said of Starbase. “Secluded and mostly filled with men,” he explained.
Tesla, which moved its headquarters from California to Austin in 2021, faces a similar, though less severe, problem, Musk said.
In Tesla's case, many of the engineers stayed in Silicon Valley
The automaker's campus, called Giga Texas, is about 30 minutes from downtown Austin, home to nearly 1 million people.
Additionally, while Tesla's top executives have mostly moved to Texas, the electric car company still maintains several robotics, energy and manufacturing operations in California.
“Tesla, being an engineering company, especially being primarily in Silicon Valley, makes it easier for people to … not have to change their lives too much. Their commute will stay pretty much the same,” he said. “Tesla still has most of its engineering activities in California,” the billionaire explained.
Musk, who has predicted Austin will become “the biggest growth city America has seen in 50 years,” has taken steps to expand his companies' campuses, including building a small company town called “Snailbrook” near The Boring Company, his tunnel-boring company, and SpaceX.
