In this week's issue:

  • Three Austin teens with an active warrant for prior gun theft turned 28 hours into 12 shootings, two fire station attacks, and one South Austin shelter-in-place — because the DA already had his shot and didn't take it
  • A 29-year-old Dell heir just raised $1.3 billion, hit a $4 billion valuation, and signed a 40-megawatt deal with Austin Energy to rewire the Texas grid from the living room out
  • Elon Musk confirms Tesla robotaxis are now running in Austin, Dallas, and Houston — with nationwide expansion on the way this year
  • Austin City Council wants to regulate data center water use; the city has 80 facilities and counting, and the people trying to manage the boom have absolutely no idea what's already inside their own service area
  • ACL turns 25 and goes global — Disney+ and Hulu are streaming it live for the first time

Let's get into it.

Top Stories

12 Shootings, 2 Fire Stations, 1 Active Warrant: Austin's 24-Hour Teen Crime Spree

Over 28 hours spanning Saturday May 16 through Sunday May 17, three juveniles — ages 15, 16, and 17 — executed 12 separate shootings across south and east Austin, stealing at least five vehicles, targeting four residences, hitting five cars with gunfire, and opening fire on two Austin fire stations while firefighters were inside. Four people were shot: three with non-life-threatening injuries, one man transported to a trauma center in critical condition after being shot in the back and stomach in Del Valle. Austin Police issued a shelter-in-place order for a large swath of South Austin (bounded by Slaughter Lane, McKinney Falls Parkway, Ben White, and Escarpment Boulevard). Manor ISD canceled bus routes and elementary classes the following morning. The suspects — identified in part as 17-year-old Cristian Mondragon-Fajardo — were finally run down by Manor PD near FM 973 after a high-speed chase, one apprehended by K9 and helicopter, before all three were taken into custody at approximately 3:23 PM Sunday.

Here's the part that should make your blood boil. Mondragon-Fajardo had an active warrant for stealing a firearm from Central Texas Gunworks at 321 W. Ben White Blvd — the same store where the spree began when a 15-year-old stole another gun on May 16. Gun store owner Michael Cargill, reported by CBS Austin journalist Vinny Martorano, said suspects had attempted to steal from his shop four times before succeeding in January — they were caught on a CityBus, APD retrieved the gun, made arrests, and then DA Jose Garza's office released the 17-year-old before May. He then spent 28 hours shooting up the city. Governor Abbott's statement was direct: "If they are ever released from jail, they will surely harm again. The DA & Court must do their job and keep these criminals behind bars." DA Garza's response was notably careful: "You will be found, you will be arrested, and you will be held accountable." Notice what he didn't say: prosecuted.

There is one more governance failure worth cataloguing here. Austin ended its contract with Flock Safety — the license plate reader technology company — in 2025, over "privacy concerns." Both Mayor Kirk Watson and Police Chief Lisa Davis publicly acknowledged at a Sunday press conference that LPRs would have helped investigators track the suspects' stolen vehicles in real time. The city sacrificed a functional crime-fighting tool on the altar of progressive surveillance anxiety, and 28 hours later, four people were shot. This spree didn't happen in a vacuum: last week we covered Governor Abbott deploying a state task force to Austin specifically because Garza's prosecution record has become a public safety crisis. The task force. The active warrant. The released juvenile. The Flock cancellation. Every link in this chain leads back to the same failure of political will — and Austin paid for it in blood.

Sources: Fox 7 Austin — APD full timeline, KUT Radio — detailed timeline, KXAN — Mayor and APD chief on Flock cameras, El Paso Times — Abbott statement, third suspect age, CBS Austin / Vinny Martorano — Cargill on four prior attempts.

Upcoming Events

The Dell Dynasty's Energy Bet: Base Power Signs 40MW Austin Energy Deal

Base Power — the Austin distributed energy startup co-founded by Zach Dell, 29-year-old son of Michael Dell — announced a 40-megawatt partnership with Austin Energy this week, adding the city's own utility to a client roster that already includes CoServ, GVEC, El Paso Electric, and half a dozen Texas co-ops. Zach Dell came up through Blackstone and Thrive Capital before co-founding Base in 2023 alongside Justin Lopas, a former SpaceX and Anduril manufacturing leader. In under two years the company raised $1.3 billion across three rounds — $68M Series A, $200M Series B, $1B Series C led by Addition — with Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Valor Equity Partners, CapitalG (Google), and Thrive all participating. Post-Series C valuation: $4 billion. The company is now building its first energy storage and power electronics factory at the former Austin American-Statesman printing press site downtown, and Dell has already told Texas Monthly where the next campus goes: "Right across from Tesla."

The business model is worth understanding because it's genuinely elegant. Base doesn't sell you a battery — it installs one at your house for roughly $700 upfront and $19 a month, keeps it on its own balance sheet, charges it when wholesale power is cheap (Texas's volatile ERCOT market produces enormous spreads), and discharges it when demand spikes. The homeowner gets backup power and a fixed electricity rate below market. Base pockets the arbitrage and builds a virtual power plant the grid operator can dispatch. The company has already deployed more than 100 MWh of residential capacity and is qualified for ERCOT's ADER pilot (Aggregated Distributed Energy Resources). Dell's framing of the company is deliberately unsentimental: "There's no new physics. We're not scientists, we're not PhDs. This is a complex coordination problem." And: "We think of ourselves as an energy company, not a climate company."

The timing of the Austin Energy deal is not coincidental. ERCOT's interconnection queue has over 410 gigawatts of pending demand — data centers alone represent 70% of that load. The February 2021 winter storm is still living rent-free in every Texan's head, and the political pressure to build distributed resilience is real. Base Power is building the solution from the living room outward, aggregating residential batteries into dispatchable grid capacity without building a single power plant. That's the Austin story in miniature: solve the infrastructure problem with capital, execution, and market mechanics, not government mandates. The Dell name in this context is not a nepotism story — it's a capital-allocation story, and $4 billion in two years is the market's verdict.

Sources: KXAN — Austin Energy partnership, Business Wire — $1B Series C announcement, Texas Monthly — Base Power profile.

Weird Austin

One Thing

This issue has two Austins in it: a 17-year-old with an active warrant shoots up the city for 28 hours because the DA already had him and let him walk. And a 29-year-old raises $1.3 billion to fix the Texas power grid from the living room out. Same city, same week. One Austin failing, one Austin building. If you know someone who should be paying attention, forward this.

  • Forward to one Austinite who needs to know what's happening
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