In this week's issue:

  • Austin outpermits the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts — and the rent data proves it worked
  • A Cedar Park startup is building precision missiles at one-tenth the cost of a Javelin, next door to a rocket company
  • Ken Paxton just ended John Cornyn's 24-year Senate career
  • SpaceX is moving every single piece of Starlink hardware production on earth to Bastrop County

Let's get after it.

Top Stories

Austin's Housing Machine Is Producing Results No Other American City Can Match

The data is in, and it's devastating for every city that chose rent control, NIMBYism, or bureaucratic delay over building. Stanford GSB professor Jonathan Berk documented what most people in Austin already sensed: the City of Austin permitted more housing annually than the entire Commonwealth of Massachusetts for much of the past decade. In 2022 alone, Austin approved 24,227 new homes — roughly 1.5 times Massachusetts' statewide total. Massachusetts has seven times Austin's population, making Austin's per-capita permitting rate approximately 10 times higher than the Bay State's. That's not a rounding error. That's a policy choice producing a measurable, compounding advantage.

Austin City Council doubled down on May 26, approving sweeping new density bonus rules that allow taller buildings citywide in exchange for defined community benefits — affordable housing units, sidewalks, and green space. The city that already out-builds entire northeastern states just expanded its building envelope further. Meanwhile, the proof that supply-side housing policy actually works arrived in the same news cycle: real estate investor Jay Martin's data shows Austin rents fell roughly 20% from their 2022 peak, dropping the city's median below the U.S. average. Compare that to St. Paul, Minnesota, which passed rent control and watched construction stall while rents climbed faster than surrounding markets. Or Minneapolis, which ended single-family zoning and held rent growth 17-34% below projections. The natural experiment has been running for years and the results are unambiguous: the cities that let owners build and operate housing profitably are the ones where renters pay less. Austin is Exhibit A.

The AI layer is just getting started. Austin startup Cedar Build raised new funding for a platform that uses generative AI and public data to map development potential on any parcel — identifying 18,000 viable infill sites in Austin and 1 million across Texas. Backed by Tishman Speyer Ventures and David Rubenstein's Shorewind Capital, Cedar converts zoning codes and compatibility overlays into financial development scenarios in real time. In the same week the Council passed new density rules, a local startup made those rules machine-readable and instantly actionable. Austin isn't just building faster than anyone else — it's automating its own housing supply chain.

Sources: Jonathan Berk on Austin vs. Massachusetts permitting | Austin City Council density bonus rules | Jay Martin on Austin rents vs. St. Paul and Minneapolis | Cedar Build raises new funding

Upcoming Events

  • Pat Green at ACL Live at The Moody Theater. Saturday May 30, 8 PM — the Texas country legend takes the Moody Theater stage; tickets on sale now.
  • Armadillo Live at Central Machine Works. June 5-7, 4824 E Cesar Chavez St, East Austin — three-day celebration honoring the Armadillo World Headquarters legacy with live music (White Denim, Holy Wave, The Greyhounds), art, kids programming, and a suggested $9.89 door donation, all ages, benefitting KUTX.
  • The Confluence at Waterloo Greenway Grand Opening. Saturday June 6, 10 AM-2 PM, along Waller Creek between 4th Street and Lady Bird Lake — 13 acres and $91.5M of public-private investment opens to the public, free, with ribbon-cutting, live music, and art; park at Austin Convention Center 5th St Garage for $5.
  • Belle & Sebastian at ACL Live at The Moody Theater. Two nights, June 1-2, 8 PM — the Scottish indie legends play back-to-back shows; tickets on sale now.
  • Comedy Mothership. Joe Rogan's flagship comedy club at 715 Red River has shows running through June — check comedymothership.com for current lineups and tickets.

Precision Missiles Are Being Built in Cedar Park, Next Door to a Rocket Company

Cedar Park is about to have a precision missile factory. Aeon Industrial — an Austin-based defense startup founded by Naweed Tahmas (Forbes 30 Under 30, Aerospace, 2025) — is expanding to a 48,000 sq ft facility in Cedar Park with $8.5M in investment and 135 new jobs (75 by end of 2027, 60 by end of 2028). The Cedar Park City Council is voting on a $1.5M incentive package plus $10,000 per-employee relocation grants. The facility sits next door to Firefly Aerospace, Cedar Park's orbital launch vehicle company — which means the stretch of northwest Austin metro adjacent to a rocket company is about to also be home to a guided missile manufacturer. That's not a coincidence. Cedar Park has been running an aggressive industrial recruitment playbook and it's working.

The product is called the Zeus ATGM — an anti-tank guided missile that weighs approximately 20 pounds, fires from a shoulder, vehicle, drone, or unmanned ground vehicle, and uses AI-assisted targeting through Aeon's proprietary ODIN software. It's fire-and-forget with tool-free payload swapping and ATAK compatibility. The strategic point of the entire system is the price: roughly $10,000 per unit versus approximately $107,000 for a Javelin. Ukraine burned through America's Javelin stockpiles faster than Raytheon can replenish them — that production bottleneck is a documented national security problem. Aeon's thesis is that vertically integrated manufacturing (propellant, solid rocket motors, igniters, and targeting software all built in-house, using carbon fiber structures and additive manufacturing) can produce precision munitions at mass-production scale that legacy defense contractors structurally cannot. Tahmas put it simply: "8 figures in contracts and growing in just a year." Aeon went from concept to guided flight in under nine months, then integrated the Zeus onto a Moog turret mounted on an unmanned ground vehicle and hit its target on the first attempt.

The investor mix is worth noting: MaC Venture Capital (a Los Angeles seed fund) and 1789 Capital (Omeed Malik's patriotic-capitalism firm) are backing the same company simultaneously — a coastal fund and an explicitly America-first venture firm agreeing that cheap precision munitions are the right bet. Army Futures Command, the Army's modernization hub, is headquartered in Austin proper, and Aeon already has contracts with the Army Applications Lab, a CRADA with DEVCOM AvMC, and completed live-fire tests for Army T2COM. The geographic proximity to AFC is real; whether Cedar Park formalizes as a defined defense corridor is a question worth watching. What's already true: a scrappy Austin-metro startup is building mass-producible precision weapons at 10 cents on the Javelin dollar, next to a rocket company, in a Texas suburb offering eight-figure relocation incentives. The post-coastal defense industrial base is assembling itself in plain sight.

Sources: Aeon Industrial Cedar Park expansion — Austin American-Statesman | Zeus ATGM live-fire test — Global Defense Corp | Aeon and Moog guided flight test — Tectonic Defense | Zeus vs. Javelin cost analysis — 19FortyFive

Weird Austin

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