Investing in Texas and reaching for the stars

Elon Musk was born in South Africa and educated at the University of Pennsylvania. He sought and made his fortune in California’s Silicon Valley. But that doesn’t mean we can’t dub the 50-year-old Tesla and SpaceX CEO — and, after his recent stock sell-off, the world’s richest man — an honorary Texan.

Indeed, long before Musk announced in October that he was moving Tesla’s headquarters to Austin, he’d invested $1.1 billion on a new Tesla manufacturing plant in southeastern Travis County. He made Texas ground zero for his aerospace and rocket company, SpaceX, which has multiple facilities across the state and its flagship launch site in southern Texas near Boca Chica.

What’s lesser known, as this newspaper reported last month, is the expansion in Texas of Musk’s tunneling and infrastructure company, the Boring Co. Or that Tesla Energy was recently licensed to provide energy in Texas and has plans to build the first solar neighborhood in Austin.

All this investment and job creation in the great state of Texas would clearly qualify Musk, who became a U.S. citizen in 2002, as a candidate for Texan of the Year. But it was, more specifically, his game-changing philanthropic efforts and charitable giving to worthy organizations in Texas and beyond and in some of our most underserved areas that earned him a spot as a finalist for 2021 Texan of the Year.

In September, a SpaceX flight raised more than $200 million for pediatric cancer research at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee, with Musk personally contributing $50 million toward that goal.

Earlier in the year, Musk shocked many in Texas with his announcement that he was “donating $20 million to Cameron County schools and $10 million to City of Brownsville for downtown revitalization.”

That came on top of Musk’s $1 million donation to Feeding Texas, a nonprofit that operates more than 20 food banks across the state that help feed more than 5 million Texans annually. What was reportedly intended to be $100,000 to help with COVID-19 relief ballooned to $1 million after February’s winter storms paralyzed parts of the state, hitting low-income families the hardest.

That’s the kind of generosity and neighborliness that Texans are famous for. And just one more reason why Elon Musk, who we hope continues to put down roots in Texas even as he reaches for the stars, is a finalist for Texan of the Year.