‘Texas Is Not For Sale': Gov.-Elect Gina Hinojosa Asks State to Hold Off on Boca Chica Land Near SpaceX's Starbase

Rockets can blast off from Boca Chica. Buying the beach next door just got a lot more complicated.

Texas Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa, the first Democrat to win the office since 1990, asked state officials to hold off on any action involving roughly 1,300 acres of public land in Cameron County. The acreage sits beside Starbase, the South Texas launch hub of SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX).

“The Valley is so important to me as the place I am from, and I will never forget it,” Hinojosa said at her first post-election news conference on Thursday.

She said she spoke with the executive director of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, David Yoskowitz, that morning and asked that “no action be taken” during the transition.

Now You See The Agenda, Now You Don’t

The fight started in October. Texas Monthly reported that the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, whose members were appointed by current Gov. Greg Abbott, planned to discuss selling the 1,300 acres in a closed-door session at its meeting last Thursday. SpaceX was reported to be the potential buyer. Boca Chica State Park, which covers more than 1,055 acres along the Gulf Coast, is part of the land, according to the Texas Tribune.

Hinojosa said earlier that day that SpaceX was removed from the commission’s agenda for that meeting.

Parks and Wildlife spokesperson Stephanie Garcia told Texas Monthly the commission “is not considering the sale of the Boca Chica property at its November meeting.” Abbott had said the commission would not take up a sale anytime soon.

Parks and Wildlife did not immediately respond to a request for further comment by Benzinga.

“No state in America has been adding more parkland than what I’ve done and what Texas has done,” Abbott said in October.

The department later asked the Texas Attorney General’s Office to block the release of a draft agenda, according to the Texas Tribune. The city of Starbase had already annexed more than 7,100 acres in September, including a large portion of the park.

Hinojosa, a Brownsville native, made the land a campaign weapon. “Like so many families in the Valley, I spent my summers at Boca Chica Beach,” she said in a statement in October. “Now, after 12 years of selling out Texas to his corporate donors and making working people foot the bill, Greg Abbott is handing over our land to the world’s only trillionaire. Let me be clear: Texas is not for sale.”

That trillionaire is SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. He was Abbott’s biggest campaign donor this cycle, according to the Texas Tribune.

SpaceX Shareholders Get a Civics Lesson

SpaceX went public in June at $135 a share in the largest initial public offering on record. Its shares fell more than 4% on Wednesday, along with Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA), after Democrats won control of Congress and the Texas governor’s race.

The bigger issue may be data centers. Hinojosa campaigned on “an immediate moratorium on data centers” until lawmakers put protections in place. She also wants to end data center subsidies and make builders prove their projects won’t raise household water and power bills. SpaceX bought AI company xAI in February, and its AI plans need a lot of computing power.

“Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” Musk wrote in a post on X Nov. 4.

On the "All-in Podcast" post-election livestream, Altimeter Capital founder Brad Gerstner said Hinojosa’s win could lead to a data center shortage in the coming year. Abbott had already paused grid approvals for new data centers in August.

The Welcome Mat Comes With Conditions

Hinojosa isn’t asking SpaceX to pack up and leave. “These are our beaches we’re talking about,” she told CNN on Thursday. “I mean, selling our beach to Elon Musk is just something that is almost unimaginable. It’s unacceptable.”

“Our beaches are enshrined in our Texas Constitution as being free and open to the people of Texas,” she continued. “Because they are our beaches, we can have a strong working relationship with Elon Musk and his companies, but it has to be on our terms.”

No sale has been approved. Starbase’s existing permits and launch infrastructure stay in place.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Benzinga.

Nobody needs a permit to build a sandcastle. SpaceX may need Austin’s blessing before it gets any more of Boca Chica. Once Hinojosa is sworn in, it will come down to whether her request becomes formal policy, and whether the beach stays public or becomes the next piece of Starbase.

Photo via Shutterstock