Crypto Critics' Corner

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Episode 172 – Is Elon Musk’s Starbase a good idea?

Is Elon Musk’s Starbase a good idea? – Crypto Critics' Corner

Cas and Bennett discuss whether or not SpaceX's Starbase is a good idea.Additional resources: Innovated Blockchain City"Potentially corrupt"Additional episodes mentioned in this episode:Episode 131 – Elon Musk’s ESG Con (feat. Eric Roesch the ESGHound)Episode 168 – When did you realize Elon Musk was a fraud?Episode 55 – Company Towns – Past, Present, and Future (feat. Dr. Ángela Vergara)Episode 171 – Is $TRUMP corrupt?This episode was recorded on May 12th, 2025.

Cas Piancey and Bennett Tomlin discuss whether or not SpaceX’s Starbase is a good idea.

This podcast was recorded on May 12th, 2025.

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English Transcript:

00:00:05:00 - 00:00:10:11
Cas Piancey
Welcome back everyone. I am Cas Piancey and I am joined, as usual by my partner in crime, Mr. Bennett Tomlin. How are you?

00:00:10:11 - 00:00:14:12
Bennett Tomlin
Oh, I'm here. How are you?

00:00:14:12 - 00:00:31:22
Cas Piancey
We are going to talk once again about Elon Musk, one of our favorite topics. We're just a huge, huge, huge fans of his, and, our, our most popular our most popular episode ever is thanks to him.

00:00:31:22 - 00:01:04:15
Cas Piancey
So, we have a lot of reasons to be quite grateful to Mr. Musk, as do everybody. Everyone in the world really should be thanking him. Particularly a group of individuals who are now going to be living in his personal fiefdom in Texas. So we're going to be talking today about his new Starbase city, which is located directly next to the rocket pad for his for his SpaceX bullshit in Texas.

00:01:04:17 - 00:01:11:13
Cas Piancey
So he's starting his own city. And we've talked about, we've talked about this before.

00:01:11:13 - 00:01:36:11
Cas Piancey
we've talked about company towns and how they generally don't work out. We had a whole episode in our Protos podcast, innovated Blockchain City about it. We specifically talked about how even the good company towns ended up failing eventually because the companies fail.

00:01:36:13 - 00:01:38:11
Cas Piancey
So the idea of, of company

00:01:38:15 - 00:01:39:23
Bennett Tomlin
Not SpaceX though.

00:01:39:23 - 00:01:49:22
Cas Piancey
but it is SpaceX and it is Elon Musk, and none of the other company towns have ever been tried by the wealthiest people of the generation. Right? That's never happened before.

00:01:49:22 - 00:01:52:11
Cas Piancey
Bennet, can you talk a little bit about the starbase idea?

00:01:52:11 - 00:02:01:12
Cas Piancey
Why why they're doing it and what it means, what it means for, I don't know, for spacex for Texas, for for all of it.

00:02:01:12 - 00:02:19:19
Bennett Tomlin
As more and more of Elon Musk's kids turn away from him, he's trying to find more and more places where he can retain power and demand people's love. And so he hopes, being the father of a new city in Texas will give him an opportunity to do that. And so he was able to convince the citizens in this area, in this county in Texas, near the space base.

00:02:19:21 - 00:02:49:04
Bennett Tomlin
Basically, all SpaceX employees who live in this area to agree to incorporate a new city. The city has elected a mayor from who ran unopposed along with a couple of city council members. And now it's a full city in Texas with all the things that cities can do. And the benefit, of course, for Elon Musk here is that that means the initial level of administration and bureaucracy and oversight above him is going to be people picked by SpaceX employees and things like that.

00:02:49:06 - 00:03:19:04
Bennett Tomlin
And the reason this is important is for the same reason that all company towns are important. You are already incredibly dependent on your company. They pay your salary. They probably pay for a large portion of your health care. So much of your livelihood in this capitalist economy is dependent on your ongoing relationship with capital, embodied in the company you work for.

00:03:19:06 - 00:03:43:11
Bennett Tomlin
Living in a town either directly or effectively under control of that company compounds that risk. And this becomes even more true in cases where, like that company explicitly controls like the shops or schools or things like that in that town, which it's not clear that SpaceX is going to like run the town grocery store or anything like that at this point.

00:03:43:11 - 00:03:49:01
Cas Piancey
I think Elon Musk already controls the school system in that area. Like, I think he's already built up his his

00:03:49:06 - 00:04:07:05
Bennett Tomlin
So he has AD astra, which I thought was a private school, which wasn't necessarily open to all the students in this area. So yes, someday we should do a whole episode on AD Astra because there's some crazy things around there. But yes.

00:04:07:05 - 00:04:22:16
Bennett Tomlin
so. Yeah. The problem here is that these individuals, even though they voted for it, even though they support it, even though they work for SpaceX, are still potentially exacerbating their own potential exploitation.

00:04:22:18 - 00:04:46:16
Bennett Tomlin
Now, whether or not you, as a listener should care about the exploitation of, SpaceX X engineers who voted for this is a separate question. But I think, more importantly, it demonstrates that many of this generation's Arab techno capitalists intend to play out many of those same patterns. They want control now, not just over the capital, but over the explicit levers of power.

00:04:46:18 - 00:05:01:02
Bennett Tomlin
That's why Elon Musk buy the presidency. That's why they're all trying to, like, get their hands dirty in politics now. And that's why he went into his own city, because they realized that the influence money bought was still not the explicit control they wanted.

00:05:01:02 - 00:05:18:03
Cas Piancey
and I want to point this out, too, which is. Which is interesting because I know before we jumped on right now, we discussed the idea. He, you know, Bennett was saying like, oh, yeah, well, this is, you know, worker exploitation is what happens in company towns. And I said, yeah, it happens when you have like essentially unskilled labor.

00:05:18:03 - 00:05:43:07
Cas Piancey
But then I thought about it just now a little bit more. And it's like one of the interesting things that Elon Musk has done is by creating Doge and getting a bunch of NASA employees fired, shrinking, NASA, shrinking like he's working to dismantle government funded space exploration. And then I might be wrong. Like how many jobs out there for rocket scientists are there?

00:05:43:07 - 00:05:59:14
Cas Piancey
If you can't work for SpaceX in America and NASA is shrinking, how many how much of a job market is there for you? I don't actually know. There might not be that much of one. In which case, you're right. Like they do have to kind of vote for it because they don't want Elon Musk to find out they voted no.

00:05:59:20 - 00:06:16:03
Cas Piancey
They don't want to get fired for voting against the Starbase city like you. You might in fact be very correct in that I might be wrong. They seem like they have a specialty. They're engineers. They're they're scientists. But maybe there's not that much of a demand or a high. Like maybe I'm wrong very

00:06:16:03 - 00:06:33:18
Bennett Tomlin
Well, before we started this call, we were also talking about another book we've both read. Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris. And one of the periods discussed in that book is kind of like, as the Cold War is coming a bit to a close as the missile race at least, is coming to a bit too close, as we're sure.

00:06:33:18 - 00:06:58:09
Bennett Tomlin
With that, a bunch of the people involved in the production of like, missiles and stuff in Palo Alto got laid off, and they had previously been these high earners in these relative positions of respect within the Palo Alto defense industry. And those jobs just ceased to exist. Right? Like there was there was no new missile factory you could go to because we were no longer ordering that many missiles.

00:06:58:11 - 00:07:20:05
Bennett Tomlin
Luckily, the war on terror brought back a lot of, contractors who would have otherwise never recovered, thank God. But, like, there are cases where, like, the ground material changes and there is nowhere else you can go. And sure, you can say Blue Origin, but Blue Origin launches, what, 1.5% as many rockets in space or something like that.

00:07:20:06 - 00:07:28:01
Bennett Tomlin
The pure amount of material being moved in, the pure number of people needed to like, refurbish, recreate and whatever that material is obviously going to be different.

00:07:28:01 - 00:07:48:10
Cas Piancey
Yeah. Yeah, I I, I genuinely hadn't hadn't considered. I was like, you know, rocket scientists and engineers are, like, the least. Like, why would I worry about their next paycheck? But now that I reflect on it, I'm like, maybe I should be more concerned about. That's not fair. So I, you know, it is true. And it is it's disappointing.

00:07:48:10 - 00:08:06:17
Cas Piancey
And we're seeing it more and more. You know, we've seen, California forever pop up as a concept, which is clearly just Silicon Valley venture capitalists being like, let's have this little sector where we can all just keep our employees, keep our people, keep, our partners secluded from the outside world. We have like, there's all these different.

00:08:06:17 - 00:08:09:08
Cas Piancey
We have the one in, where was it? Nicaragua.

00:08:09:12 - 00:08:11:14
Bennett Tomlin
Are you thinking of Prospera in Honduras?

00:08:11:14 - 00:08:13:04
Cas Piancey
Honduras. Right in

00:08:13:04 - 00:08:31:22
Bennett Tomlin
Well, so? So this is the next one I was going to bring up. There was reporting from Wired in March of this year that the Prospera people, as well as a bunch of the other, like, startups, cities, that's what they call themselves. These new company towns were, meeting with Trump to specifically push for American regulations, kind of like the qualified economic zone.

00:08:31:22 - 00:08:51:23
Bennett Tomlin
We talked about when it came to Painted Rock Smart City, but that even more so, like exempted it from certain federal regulations and approval things and things like that, so that someone like Prospera could come up and start a new city in the United States, exempt from a bunch of laws and create their own and stuff. And that is the explicit pitch that people are giving to Trump.

00:08:52:04 - 00:08:55:07
Bennett Tomlin
And, you know, if they buy enough Trump coin, they can do it over dinner.

00:08:55:11 - 00:08:55:18
Cas Piancey
Yeah,

00:08:55:18 - 00:08:57:08
Bennett Tomlin
in a possibly corrupt way.

00:08:57:08 - 00:09:14:20
Cas Piancey
I guess the basic fact of the matter is, is similar to the Trump coin and the lack of financial disclosures and the lack of transparency with this administration. You go, why would they do that? Right? Why would they shut off all of these?

00:09:15:00 - 00:09:32:10
Cas Piancey
It's because they're doing something weird back there. Who knows what it is, but they're doing something that they don't want other people to see. Why is Elon Musk feeling like it's super necessary for him to control his own city? I mean, ask yourself, right? Like, why? Because he wants

00:09:32:10 - 00:09:34:14
Bennett Tomlin
Or ask Eric Roesch.

00:09:34:14 - 00:09:58:05
Cas Piancey
get away. Yeah. I ask Eric Roesch, who we've had on and basically knew this was coming. Very disappointed with Pete Buttigieg, and his inability to rein in Elon Musk while he was working under Biden and very disappointed, with Democrats in general, with how they're treating Elon Musk and Donald Trump. They should definitely be.

00:09:58:07 - 00:10:19:17
Cas Piancey
Like, I don't know if you can't push back against this shit. I don't know what the fuck you're doing. So yeah, they should be pushing back against it. Starbase is going to be bad. It's going to be bad for everybody. And ultimately, when or if, I guess I should say, if Elon Musk does face some form of justice for the crazy shit that he's done over the past half year.

00:10:19:19 - 00:10:30:00
Cas Piancey
Like what happens, right? What happens to these places? What happens to Starbase? What happens to the space places? And I suspect they're polluted. I suspect there's issues with them. Who's going to clean up?

00:10:30:06 - 00:10:52:15
Bennett Tomlin
Well. And what happens to this town if three years from now, every contract awarded during this administration is put under review, investigated, challenged by Congress, things like that. And suddenly space is like expected. Revenue or stuff like that is cut by three quarters, you know, like having.

00:10:52:15 - 00:10:58:07
Cas Piancey
he'll just raise, from Chinese investors and Russian investors again. Be okay. Right.

00:10:58:16 - 00:11:21:21
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah. I mean, I mean, maybe and like just broadly, what I want people to understand is that there are basically zero economic problems that have resulted from Elon Musk being too restrained for the like. Never have we come up in a situation where we're like, oh, damn, we could have solved this if we just took those damn, like, leash off Elon Musk and let him go wild.

00:11:21:23 - 00:11:52:21
Bennett Tomlin
And I think even like an example, Doctor William K black in his book, the best way to Rob a Bank is to own one about the snow crisis, talks about how, when gray initially came into the Thrift Supervision board, I think it was, he had to start reregulate. And that had he not re regulated and started to put some limits on these high fliers, which was very, very, very, very, very controversial at the time, with many people saying doing this is going to be like this limit that's going to destroy things.

00:11:52:23 - 00:12:15:18
Bennett Tomlin
It is likely that, like the snow crisis would have continued to compound until it was like a multitrillion dollar problem, like potentially like a United States and globally economy devastating event. And so like removing these restrictions can sometimes be helpful, but it needs to be done very thoughtfully, very carefully, and not because Elon Musk said so.

00:12:15:18 - 00:12:34:05
Cas Piancey
Yeah. There's they. Look, there's arguments to be made about. Like how we zone for housing, how we zone for commercial, how, like, if we want to talk about zoning and NIMBYism and and NIMBYism and all of the all these different concepts of, like, how to build and where to build and why regulation needs to be there or not.

00:12:34:11 - 00:12:59:20
Cas Piancey
That's fine. I think, I think when you're just mass deleting all forms of regulation, that that is a real issue. And that is like that is what these guys want. They don't they don't care about figuring out the right way to go about it. They they care about how they're going to benefit the most from it.

00:12:59:20 - 00:13:22:10
Cas Piancey
It's always about them. It's never about pushing. They they'll claim it is, but it's never about actually, we should never be even thinking about going to like Mars. Like everyone, anyone who knows about this stuff far more than I do will tell you we can't even we can't even terraform Antarctica. Why would we go terraform Mars? It just doesn't make any sense at all.

00:13:22:12 - 00:13:28:06
Cas Piancey
And I, I, I by that I think that's correct. I think that's the right take.

00:13:28:13 - 00:13:47:20
Bennett Tomlin
I mean, that's that's obviously correct, right? Terraforming Mars is at least two orders of magnitude harder than terraforming Earth. And we haven't figured out how to terraform Earth yet. And so, like, the only way to live on Mars, really, for at least several centuries, is you wait for certain processes to kick off is to, like, live inside bases and things like that.

00:13:47:22 - 00:14:12:21
Bennett Tomlin
And that is not what Elon Musk tends to describe in his visions. Yeah. And just like we talked about this sometimes with Bitcoiners, they like to pretend they're joking when they say that the reason they went Bitcoin is so they can get into the Bitcoin citadels, but there is actually techno feudalism at the heart of a lot of these people's beliefs at the heart of like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel's and Curtis Yarvin.

00:14:12:21 - 00:14:29:06
Bennett Tomlin
And these people's belief, they really do fundamentally believe they are better than you, that they deserve more than you, and that they specifically should be given power over you in a way that you cannot reverse. That is like their truest, deepest beliefs.

00:14:29:06 - 00:15:03:02
Cas Piancey
yeah. And you know, clearly, Elon Musk is not alone in his starbase dreams. Like, they they all want to do something along these lines. Maybe to bigger or lesser, like bigger or lesser degrees. They all seem to want to do something wild like this, which I've criticized this before, but generally when you just get so much money that you never have to think about it ever again in any real sense of the word, you start having these psychotic concepts of what is okay.

00:15:03:03 - 00:15:19:23
Cas Piancey
They are all building bunkers across the globe. They're all like, Mark Zuckerberg, the shit. Have you seen him on these podcasts? He's like talking about his tunnel in under his house in Hawaii. But then he keeps when depending on who he's talking to, it completely changes. And then he shows it and there's a fucking movie theater underneath it.

00:15:19:23 - 00:15:32:17
Cas Piancey
And like, I, you you have a bunker in Hawaii. Dude, you do not. It is not a tunnel, you know, like. And Sam Altman has a bunker. Elon Musk has a button. These guys all have bunkers

00:15:33:03 - 00:15:38:22
Bennett Tomlin
Several of them have multiple bunkers, like in different countries.

00:15:38:22 - 00:15:45:16
Cas Piancey
they they all do it. They're all super fearful. And I think that goes back to this idea of like what are they fearful of?

00:15:45:19 - 00:16:09:19
Cas Piancey
I'll tell you. And it's us. It's just normal ass people that's who they're afraid of. They cannot relate to us. They don't understand what it's like to be a normal fucking human being who doesn't simply want more money all the time. Like, I think we all do want more money, but it's not our main concern. So I like yeah, I don't know everything about this is sad and troubling, but also the path that we're obviously going towards Starbase is going to get built.

00:16:09:19 - 00:16:16:15
Cas Piancey
It's going to happen. There's going to be this whatever Elon Musk fucking city now. But I've heard they're going to use cascoin.

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