In this week's issue:

  • SpaceX quietly installing chip equipment 30 miles outside Austin — and it's not the Terafab you heard about in March
  • Austin's CISO fired amid an IT scandal that touches Dallas, $210M in annual overspend, and a City Council that just made it harder to track lobbyists
  • A Friday night homicide outside an East Austin cocktail bar — Austin's 20th of 2026
  • An AI that legally owns a lobster restaurant in Austin, with human employees reporting to it

Let's get into it.

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Top Stories

Feature #1

SpaceX Is Building a Chip Factory 30 Miles from Austin — And It's Not Terafab

When Elon announced Terafab at GigaTexas in March, most coverage treated it as the headline for SpaceX's semiconductor ambitions in Texas. That framing missed something concrete that was already happening 30 miles southeast of Austin. SpaceX began installing advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment at its Bastrop, TX facility this week, according to Reuters and multiple wire sources. The target: high-volume production of RF chips for Starlink satellites and consumer hardware by end of 2026. Equipment is on a factory floor. This is not a vision statement.

The distinction from Terafab matters. Terafab is a longer-horizon wafer fabrication project at the GigaTexas campus in Austin, where site clearing began in late March. The Bastrop facility is something different and more immediate — it is specifically a chip packaging operation using Panel-Level Packaging (PLP) technology, which processes chips on large rectangular panels rather than traditional round wafers. PLP delivers higher throughput and lower cost per unit, and it sidesteps the global semiconductor packaging bottleneck that has squeezed TSMC and ASE Group customers for years. SpaceX is building its own in-house packaging capability for the RF chips that run Starlink modems and ground terminals, cutting dependency on external suppliers who control a critical chokepoint in the satellite supply chain. The strategic logic mirrors Tesla's move to manufacture its own battery cells — control the constraint, insulate the operation.

The financial backing is serious. SpaceX is investing $280 million in the Bastrop expansion, with 400-plus jobs projected, according to Governor Abbott's office. Texas put $17.3 million of the Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund into the project in a grant announced over a year ago — the state's buy-in predates the current equipment installation by 13 months, suggesting this has been moving quietly through the pipeline while the Terafab announcement grabbed headlines. The timeline is aggressive: roughly eight months from equipment install to production. For a packaging facility — significantly less complex than a full wafer fab — that's achievable. SpaceX has not issued a formal press release; all reporting comes from sources familiar with the project. But equipment on a floor is harder to walk back than a press conference.

Sources: Reuters, Governor Abbott / Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund, X Daily News

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Feature #2

Austin's IT Department Was a Mess Before the Firings — Now We Know How Bad

Three weeks ago, the City of Austin quietly terminated its top cybersecurity official and two senior IT architects. Brian Gardner, the city's Chief Information Security Officer, along with Senior IT Enterprise Architects Hawre Sulaiman and William Snead, were all let go during the week of March 23, according to the Austin American-Statesman. The official explanation from city spokesperson Jenny Caputo: "an ongoing internal review." That phrase is doing a lot of work. All three had previously worked under City Manager T.C. Broadnax at the City of Dallas before he brought them to Austin in 2024. City Hall has confirmed the terminations are not related to any cybersecurity threat. Beyond that, no one is talking — Gardner and Sulaiman cited advice of counsel when contacted; Snead couldn't be reached. Social media accounts have circulated allegations of undisclosed dual employment with Dallas, but that characterization has not been confirmed by any traditional reporting outlet. What is confirmed: there is an ongoing internal review, three senior IT officials are gone, and interim CIO Jeremiah Clifton is now running the department.

The firings would be notable on their own. But they land on top of an already-damning picture of how Austin runs its IT shop. A Gartner audit released earlier this year found Austin spends approximately $210 million per year more on IT than peer cities of comparable size. The city has 98% more IT staff than its peers. Only 30% of IT staff is centralized, versus 81% at comparable cities. To put it plainly: Austin has built an IT apparatus that is roughly twice as bloated as a well-run city its size would have, and it is spending a nine-figure premium for the privilege. Proposals to consolidate IT services have faced resistance from the city's IT union, which — according to social media reporting — is now using the CISO firing as leverage against reform: a bureaucratic counter-move straight out of the playbook of every entrenched municipal workforce that has ever blocked a cost-saving restructuring.

The second thread is, if anything, more audacious. On March 12, Austin City Council approved an ordinance eliminating the requirement for city departments to track their own meetings with lobbyists. The sign-in sheet system that had been in place since 2016 is gone. The change passed on the consent agenda — the procedural equivalent of burying it in the fine print — with no floor debate. Accountability now relies entirely on lobbyists self-reporting their own interactions in quarterly filings, with no independent verification mechanism. This matters because a 2025 KXAN investigation found a paid lobbyist texting council members while they sat on the dais during votes — the exact behavior this change now makes structurally invisible. A civic watchdog testified about the consequences on April 9. The council, apparently, was not persuaded enough to show up and debate it in the first place.

Sources: Austin American-Statesman — CISO firings, Austin American-Statesman — IT audit, Austin American-Statesman — lobbyist rules, Steve on X, Jen Robichaux on X

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The Exit

One Thing

SpaceX is installing chip equipment 30 miles from your house and the city is busy eliminating lobbyist tracking requirements on the consent agenda. That gap — between what's being built and what's being mismanaged — is exactly what this newsletter exists to document.

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