Their Dream Was to Build an Organic Farm. Then Elon Musk Moved In.

When they learned that Elon Musk had purchased 280 acres of land a short drive from their organic farm, it seemed like a miracle. For more than a decade, husband and wife Skip Connett and Erin Flynn had worked to turn Wilbarger Bend, a rural agricultural area located in a lush floodplain along the Colorado River about a half-hour drive southeast of downtown Austin, into a community-based farming hub like others around the country. Though they’d enjoyed some success over their five years of working the land, it had become apparent that their vision would require more money and more property. For years, Flynn had joked that what the couple needed was for a benevolent billionaire to drop out of the sky—someone who was willing to buy up some of the state’s best farmland before it turned into another subdivision and who wanted to provide the region with more healthy, affordable food. “When Elon Musk arrived, we thought, ‘Well, this is incredible!’ ” Flynn said during a recent tour of the Bastrop County farm, which lies about a mile from two of Musk’s newly arrived enterprises, SpaceX’s Starlink facility and the Boring Company. “His mother is a dietician and his brother, Kimbal Musk, is a restaurateur and proponent of the farm-to-table movement. We thought, ‘This is a family that understands the importance of good food and sustainable farming.’ ” 

Like one of their new neighbor’s multimillion-dollar rockets, however, it didn’t take long for Connett and Flynn’s pandemic-era fantasy to come crashing down to earth. What seemed serendipitous at the time, they say, now appears more like a cruel twist of fate. Despite sending neighborly letters and reaching out through intermediaries, Connett and Flynn say neither Musk nor his brother has expressed any interest in collaborating with them to ensure the area’s devotion to farming is preserved. Instead, the couple and other local farmers say, three years after Musk’s purchase, the fertile land along the banks of the Colorado, shaded by pecan trees and frequented by bald eagles, is being transformed into an environmentally hazardous industrial park. What has long been a bucolic area marked by one-room churches, small family farms, and historic colonies settled by freed slaves is quickly becoming a place where, some locals say, profit takes precedence over conserving the past. 

As the price of local land skyrockets and property taxes follow suit, in part because of Musk’s arrival, multigenerational farmers are being forced to offload family properties onto developers and gravel-mining companies that have descended upon the area to take advantage of the industrial boom ten miles west of downtown Bastrop. At least one ranch was recently sold to a California investor who buys property wherever Musk does, neighbors said. Rolling fields are being turned into a medley of chaotic construction sites, subdivisions, and multistory apartment complexes that are in juxtaposition to fields of grazing livestock. 

To advocate for farmland preservation and call attention to what he and other locals consider reckless development practices that threaten the Colorado River, Connett in 2021 cofounded Friends of the Land, a grassroots coalition that monitors the environmental consequences of industrialization in western Bastrop County. “It’s almost like this thing just dropped out of the sky and nobody knew what to do with it,” says Connett, whose property is now surrounded by three mining operations that arrived after Musk, “and then it started growing, and taking over, before anyone knew what it was and how to contain it.” 

Bastrop’s relatively inexpensive land and proximity to the river has long attracted outsiders hoping to profit from its unique location. Beginning in the 1830s, the county’s timber industry supplied cities such as San Antonio and Austin with lumber for construction. Over the next century, the local economy was dominated by lumber, cotton, and coal mining. African Americans flocked to the area in the years after emancipation, forming at least a dozen freedom colonies. By 1890, African Americans made up 43 percent of the county’s residents, roughly double what was then the state average, according to census records quoted by the Austin American-Statesman. More than 130 years later, the area’s African American population has dwindled, in part because of the skyrocketing cost of Central Texas land, which has prompted many longtime families to sell their properties. Connett and Flynn, in fact, purchased their land from an African American family…