Let’s stop calling them “visionaries” and start calling them what they are: landlords with branding teams.

From Elon Musk’s Snailbrook to Peter Thiel’s floating cities, from Google’s Mountain View megaproject to California Forever’s 60,000-acre land grab—billionaires are building the next generation of company towns and they’re selling it with the same lie we’ve heard a million times before:

“This time, it’s different.”

But it’s not. It’s the same old company town logic—dressed in sustainability jargon, wrapped in Silicon Valley aesthetics, and sold as “the future.” It’s a world where public and affordable housing is demonized as “socialism” while private corporate towns are rebranded as techno-utopias.

Welcome to the second wave of the company town, where your boss doesn’t just sign your paycheck — he owns your home, the cornerstore market, he writes your laws, and decides if your version of community fits his brand of “society.”

Snailbrook: Elon Musk’s soft-launches his vision for tech feudalism

Elon Musk’s Snailbrook, Texas—a master planned community for SpaceX and Boring Company workers—offers $800/month homes, shared amenities like a basketball court and a playground, and even a school. But the fine print reads like every other corporate lease agreement: residents who lose their jobs will be evicted in 30 days.

In addition to the stress of working under Elon Musk as your CEO (known for erratic firing and abusive leadership), all of your basic needs —shelter, healthcare, education—come with strings attached to your employment, making it that much harder to speak up, unionize, or even quit.

Can you imagine receiving an eviction notice on your front door because you tweeted about your disappointment when Elon Musk did a sieg heil?

Musk isn’t building a utopia. He simply rebooted the 21st-century Pullman, Illinois model —the infamous 1890s company town where workers were evicted at gunpoint during a strike. At Snailbrook, Musk doesn’t need armed guards. He’s got eviction clauses in case you tweet out of line, and NDA’s to silence you from ever speaking up. If you thought living in an HOA-controlled neighborhood with overbearing Karens as your neighbors was bad, imagine what it’d be like if Elon had control over your home.

Middlefield Park: Google’s “Smart City” looks like a 20-year construction site

Google’s Middlefield Park in Mountain View is being sold as a futuristic urban oasis: 1,900 homes, 1.3 million square feet of office space, and miles of parks and bike paths.

But the 20-year construction timeline tells a different story—one that locks the city’s growth to Google’s corporate strategy. This long-term vision doesn’t address the dire need for affordable housing in the Bay Area but instead, hordes much-needed Bay Area land for yet another tech company handout.

Despite claims of affordability, Middlefield Park only plans on using a small 2.4-acre lot for up to 380 affordable units—roughly 5% of the total 1,900 units. Rather than integrating affordable housing throughout the development, the company pushed to offload it onto a single site, isolating lower-income residents from the rest of the so-called community.

To make matters worse, Google negotiated a fast-tracked approval process that bypasses city council review for much of the project, minimizing public input on one of the largest developments in city history.

Telosa: an Arizona dream or a desert nightmare?

Dystopian tech cities aren’t just reserved for Californians — Nevada, Utah, and Arizona are included in the dystopian fun! Drive further east towards Appalachia and the American West desert and you’ll come across the futuristic city of Telosa imagined by Marc Lore, ex-Walmart president.

This $400 billion desert city for 5 million people will be powered by solar panels and driverless cars and is expected to have 50,000 residents by 2030. Drive to the center of this corporate town and you’ll find a skyscraper called “Equitism Tower” (I thought technofascists hated DEI?)

Marc doesn’t just want to build a new city, he confidently feels he’s creating a “new model for society.”

Telosa residents are able to build and sell homes, but sole ownership of the land still belongs to the city. Lore believes investments and rent would net Telosa $40bn a year which they would use to fund socialist-like social services including hospitals, schools, public parks and transportation.

And while Marc Lore’s promises of Telosa sounds magical and futuristic, the harsh reality of not only financing Telosa, but finding enough water, energy, and land, makes this desert dream more of a desert nightmare. Telosa hasn’t secured the land, the water rights, nor have they proven that Marc’s economic model could work for a town of 50 people, let alone 5 million.

California Forever: why house everyday Americans when you can build a city for techbros?

You thought we were done with California? Not quite. Head back West to Solano County and you’ll find a venture backed by Trump-loyalist Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, and Laurene Powell Jobs that spent over $800 million to buy up 60,000 acres of farmland for their new community, California Forever.

The group—operating through a shell company called Flannery Associates—pitched a sleek, sustainable city for 400,000 residents, complete with walkable streets, renewable energy, and digital renderings that look like every other futuristic city we’ve seen so far.

But when their 2024 ballot initiative collapsed under public backlash, they pivoted fast. Now, California Forever is partnering with two small towns—Suisun City and Rio Vista—to annex the land and move forward without a county-wide vote.

Fighting back against California Forever’s quest for California gold (land) are local organizations like Solano Together who’ve warned the public that annexation could destroy long-term growth plans, burden small towns with massive infrastructure demands, and give billionaires even more control over their city.

Big tech socialism for us, ruthless capitalism for everyone else

None of these utopian cities offer anything new. We’ve seen this model of “socialism for me, but not for thee” before with Silicon Valley.

Big tech companies like Google, Netflix, and Apple sold us on the idea of a futuristic workplace with free kombucha, free shuttles to and from work, and complementary massages—not because they cared, but because they wanted to keep workers on-site and under control.

Then the layoffs hit, COVID happened, the cafeterias with free food scaled down their offerings, and the long list of quality of life perks disappeared. And suddenly, the entire “work-life utopia” collapsed under the weight of their own promises.

If you think the open-air office lifestyle of Google and Buzzfeed fell from grace, imagine what would happen if mass layoffs occurred at a company town like Middlefield Park where entire sections of the city are reserved for company employees.

Every one of these alt-cities makes the same pitch: “We’ll solve what the government can’t.”

But what they’re really doing is replacing the public sector with privately owned solutions. If they control the housing, the infrastructure, the parks, the playgrounds, the schools, and the laws—then they get to define who belongs and who doesn’t.

And when it stops being profitable? They can pull the rug from underneath you without any warning, leaving behind yet another deserted town that was never designed to last.

What We Actually Need: Public Housing and Infrastructure, Not Corporate Utopias

Let’s get something straight. The alternative to billionaire city-states isn’t clinging to broken systems. It’s fighting for systems that actually serve us:

• Close annexation loopholes so billionaires can’t buy cities.

• Reinvest in public infrastructure so everyone can travel for free.

• Fund schools, housing, and healthcare without corporate strings attached.

True progress isn’t about investing in futuristic desert cities. Real progress is about investing in public solutions that see the potential in everyday Americans struggling to find affordable housing and healthcare. We grow our society not by showering the top 1% of America with more luxury apartments, but by watering the other 99% who haven’t reached their full potential.

Because when your boss is also your landlord, your mayor, and your ride to work—your rights aren’t your rights anymore — they’re temporary office perks.

Stories On My Radar

How MAGA centrists blamed a viral racist rant on the ‘woke’

Shiloh Hendrix, a white woman in Minnesota, went viral for hurling a racial slur at a Black child, then raised over $700,000 from supporters who hailed her as a “hero” of the so-called “woke right.”

Instead of condemning her behavior, MAGA-aligned centrists and Trump-friendly pundits spun the incident into a blame-the-left narrative—arguing that Shiloh represents one of many white folks plagued with “Black fatigue” — an appropriated term they stole from Mary Frances Winters to represent their “fatigue” with living with Black folks.

But as this piece lays out, that framing is not only dishonest—it’s typical racist revisionism.

👉 Read the full article on MSNBC:
How MAGA centrists blamed a viral racist rant on the ‘woke’

Monday Meme Dumps

Wednesday Reel Roundup

BIPOC Creators You Should Follow

Meet George Lee Jr, aka Conscious Lee, a brilliant educator, public speaker, and content creator who I’ve followed for years for his insightful videos and informative explanations of race, gender, colonization, and capitalism.

What I appreciate most about Conscious Lee are the connections he makes between pop culture and politics. Calling something out as problematic is one thing, but having the surgical precision to explain why these problems exist in the first place (on an academic level) in an accessible and entertaining way is another.

I’ve learned from him about the shared struggles of Palestinian and Black folks, the political complexities of neocolonialism in Congo, and a variety of domestic issues related to the Trump administration and Elon Musk.

If you’re looking for a sharp political commentary that is both fun and educational, follow Conscious Lee on Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok. 

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