Elon Musk is already building a Tesla town in Texas.

A group of billionaires has spent around 800 million dollars to buy land in California’s Solano County, via the secretive company Flannery Associates. 

The goal, according to U.S. media reports, is to establish a dream city near San Francisco. 

Investors in this venture include prominent figures such as Laurene Powell Jobs, Reid Hoffman, Michael Moritz, and a Silicon Valley venture capital firm called Andreessen Horowitz. 

Records indicate that Flannery Associates has been acquiring land for this city project since around 2017, although details about the plans remain scarce.

Solano County. Credit: Business Insider via Google Maps

In a 2017 email to a potential investor, Michael Moritz, a Welsh-born American billionaire, venture capitalist, philanthropist, author, and former journalist, and a former partner at the company Sequoia Capital, described the envisioned city as a walkable, clean energy-powered metropolis generating jobs and accommodating tens of thousands of residents. 

While the company has been discreetly raising funds and accumulating land, it gained attention in May when it sued Solano County landowners, alleging artificial land price inflation by area residents.

The cost of an acre, initially 5,000 dollars, has risen to around 20,000. So far, the company has purchased tens of thousands of hectares. 

In July, a plot purchase by Flannery Associates near the Travis Air Force Base prompted a government inquiry.

Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs prodigy, has been revealed as the mastermind behind the initiative. 

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The project aims to address issues plaguing Silicon Valley, such as rising home prices, homelessness, and congestion, as articulated by Moritz in 2017.

Mind that San Francisco’s problems exist at a great extent due to the tech industry’s activities, including contribution from the billionaires who are trying now to push through this unnamed project.

San Francisco bay. Credit: TripAdvisor

Despite the ambition of this new city project, it raises questions about escaping problems by adopting an expensive solution and could become a utopian experiment in urban governance.

Yet, one man insists that such ideas are not bad after all.

Snailbrook

Elon Musk, the CEO of the automaker Tesla, social media platform X, and aeronautics company SpaceX, is actually building a whole town on the outskirts of Austin, Texas.

Named “Snailbrook”, it is a place where Tesla Gigafactory employees will live and work, without even having to go elsewhere for shopping or entertainment. Musk-owned and affiliated companies have acquired more than 14 hectares of land in the Austin area for the future town.

The billionaire, who loves to be the first everywhere, will probably become Snailbrook’s first (and eternal) mayor.

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