Just days after Elon Musk spent $1.6 million to back Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Texas U.S. Senate race, one of his firms filed a lawsuit against the AG and Grimes County to block the release of Terafab information via public records requests to two county residents.
SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace and space rocket manufacturer, filed the suit against Grimes County and Paxton’s office after Marie Egyed and Vanessa Burzynski, both county residents, filed the public records requests. Musk is asking a judge to permanently block both the county and the attorney general from releasing SpaceX confidential information, according to the Houston Business Journal.
Egyed filed a Texas Public Information Act request on behalf of community organization Grimes County Citizens for Responsible Development, and Burzynski filed as an individual.
The pair of requests center on information related to Musk’s Terafab, a massive, $55 billion, vertically integrated semiconductor plant set to rise about 15 miles from College Station, Texas. The Terafab, which is being built in conjunction by two Musk companies, SpaceX and xAI, is set to span 100 million square feet of space and manufacture chips for Musk’s dizzying tech empire.
Egyed and the GCRRD said in a statement to the outlet that they had not sought out confidential information and that their request centers around an application and county negotiations about tax incentives for the plant.
Following receiving the requests, Grimes County reached out to the AG’s office for a ruling. Paxton denied most of the communications between county attorneys and employees, according to the outlet, citing attorney-client privilege. The denial was only partial: Paxton’s office directed the county to release emails and attachments sent or received from parties that attorney-client privilege does not protect.
SpaceX and Musk argue that the Terafab is in a critical infrastructure classification which would normally be protected from records requests by state law. Musk, who became the richest man in the world earlier this year, also contends that disclosing negotiations would harm the company’s business by revealing how it picks its sites and how it gets tax breaks.
Land clearing for the Terafab development has already begun.
— Hunter Cooke
Read more
Elon Musk’s $55M chipmaking facility Terfab is coming to College Station
Elon Musk’s Tesla juices Austin industrial holdings with 500k sf lease
Elon Musk’s Austin area empire triples land holdings
