Corporate Greed (Part 13): When a billionaire comes to town (#480)

We drove into Van Horn, Texas, as we have done once a year for the past eleven years and sat down for dinner in the dining room of the El Capitan Hotel.

Built in 1930, El Capitan still carries itself with the quiet dignity of another era. The food is excellent, the wine list carefully chosen, the service warm and unhurried.

For us, the El Capitan has become a ritual. Proof that some things endure when care, community, and craftsmanship are valued.

Just north of this little town of roughly 2,000 people, another ritual plays out: rockets rising over the desert from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One. The spaceport sits on Corn Ranch, about 30 miles north of Van Horn in Culberson County, on a property acquired by Jeff Bezos in 2004.

When Blue Origin first set up near Van Horn, many locals assumed it would be good for the town. New jobs. New energy. An influx of young people. In the early years, that hope had some basis in reality.

Workers came into town to eat, stay in hotels, and buy houses. A 2021 feature in the Houston Chronicle described roughly 300 employees bringing business to restaurants, getting involved in the museum, and, in the mayor’s words, “starting to become neighbors.”

Blue Origin has also made some direct financial contributions. By 2022, company representatives and local officials were pointing to more than $1 million in grants for the school district, food bank, and local infrastructure, along with new housing - an apartment complex and a dozen single-family homes.

On paper, this sounds like a textbook story of corporate philanthropy and rural revitalization.

But the lived picture in Van Horn is much more complicated.

First, the scale of Blue Origin’s footprint compared with its local contributions is striking. A private launch complex and engine test site spread across 165,000 acres, within a much larger block of Bezos-owned land reported elsewhere to be substantially larger than the launch site itself, is paired with community grants that, while meaningful on the ground, are tiny relative to the wealth and land involved.

Second, the benefits that do exist are unevenly distributed. Much of the new taxable value sits outside the town limits, flowing primarily to Culberson County rather than the municipality of Van Horn.

Local reporting and planning documents stress that the city of Van Horn has long depended on state and federal grants to repair aging infrastructure. In 2022, for example, the U.S. Department of Commerce awarded $1.7 million in federal funds to help Van Horn build an elevated water tank - an essential investment in basic water storage, financed not by Blue Origin but by national taxpayers through the American Rescue Plan.

Here’s the cruel twist: Blue Origin’s highly paid workforce has been cited in local reporting as complicating the town’s eligibility for some of the grants it relies on. The Houston Chronicle reports that Van Horn’s infrastructure - its pipes, wells, and water tower - needs major work, yet the higher incomes associated with the spaceport can disqualify the town from programs aimed at low-income communities.

The same Houston Chronicle article notes that residents face a tight housing market and that Blue Origin’s presence has coincided with the loss of eligibility for certain critical funding sources.

In other words: the rockets rise on infrastructure partly funded by grants that Van Horn increasingly struggles to access.

Corporate greed, in this context, doesn’t always look like overt hostility.

It often looks like structural extraction paired with carefully curated generosity:

• A giant private facility that uses regional water, power, roads, and emergency services - much of which is publicly funded - but is physically and socially insulated from town life.

• Highly visible one-off grants and public-relations gestures that sit alongside much larger, largely invisible streams of value flowing away from the community.

• A tax and grant landscape in which the presence of a wealthy employer can undermine eligibility for the very assistance a small town needs to keep its pipes, wells, and schools functioning.

Meanwhile, places like the El Capitan Hotel give back in quieter ways. For nearly a century, it has contributed through constancy: employing locals, welcoming travelers, maintaining a beautiful historic building on the main street.

El Capitan’s success depends on the health of the town around it, not on the insulation of a gated compound in the desert.

The lesson from Van Horn is not that space exploration is inherently bad, nor that companies should never build self-contained facilities.

It is that corporate responsibility must be measured by participation, not just publicity.

If you operate a 165,000-acre launch site 30 miles from a small town, drawing on its utilities, roads, labor force, and symbolic identity, you owe more than a few high-profile grants. You owe sustained, predictable investment in the civic fabric: schools, water systems, housing, and public spaces that make life better for everyone, not just for those with a badge to Astronaut Village.

Until that happens, Van Horn will remain what it is today: a community beneath a launch pad, watching rockets climb toward the edge of space while struggling to fix the pipes under its own streets.

And that, in a nutshell, is what corporate greed looks like in the twenty-first century.

Less a smash-and-grab, more an elegant siphon.

Leaving behind, in towns like Van Horn, the quiet question:

Who really benefits when the billionaires come to town?

Sound familiar?

Selected Reading

Here’s how Van Horn has changed afterJeff Bezos and Blue Origin’s takeover. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2021/visuals/blue-origin-bezos-van-horn-transformation/

[This piece is an opinion and analysis based on publicly available reporting and the author’s personal observations.]

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