Elon Musk Attempting To Buy Up Homes In Southaven, Mississippi, After Data Center Complaints

One really has to wonder whether billionaire tech bro Elon Musk is intentionally a living, breathing composite of every movie villain ever.

He’s already a racist, Nazi salute-waving, white nationalist, who funds the campaigns of racist politicians, whose only Black friends were his servants (allegedly), and whose fraud detection department turned out to be a fraud in itself. He’s already a propagandist who claims to be a champion of free speech, but cancels the programs of journalists who made him look stupid on the platform he took over. He’s already shown himself to be a terrible human being in a dozen different ways.

Did he really need to also be the rich and powerful capitalist whose data centers are wreaking havoc on poor communities of people, whom he is now reportedly trying to buy out of their homes?

That’s right, y’all, people in a Mississippi neighborhood have reportedly been receiving offers to sell their houses to Musk’s AI company, many of whom have already expressed their opposition to a nearby power plant central to the Tesla CEO’s ambitions of being a leading producer of artificial intelligence technology.

From The Guardian:

Real estate agents have been going door to door in Southaven, Mississippi, on behalf of xAI, touting a deal to purchase houses as long as the owners agree to not join a lawsuit against the company over the power plant’s noise. (Musk’s AI company officially became SpaceXAI in July and has lately been rebranded as SpaceXSI but to neighbors of the datacenter in Mississippi, it remains xAI.)

This plan could potentially swallow up almost the entire neighborhood of Colonial Hills, on the western flank of Southaven. A realtor told one resident there is a target to purchase 418 homes, with 18 homeowners already agreeing to sell, according to a recording of a conversation heard by the Guardian. xAI did not respond to questions over these numbers and its plans for the neighborhood and has previously said it intends to be a good neighbor; it denies all claims in the noise lawsuit.

By the way, Southaven borders Memphis, Tennessee, another city that has been embroiled in a legal dispute against Musk and his data centers, which have been accused of polluting the predominantly Black communities near a supercomputer facility owned by his company.

The Guardian noted that the average price of homes in Southaven is about $180,000, which is basically a market value that amounts to pennies as far as the world’s richest man is concerned. Since July 2024, xAI has constructed three vast data centers in Memphis and Southaven, called Colossus I, Colossus II, and MACROHARDRR.

In Southaven, three plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in June, complaining of “near-constant noise, vibrations and other nuisance-level harms” from the nearby xAI power plant.

“There’s a high-pitched hum and then another sound like an airplane over your house,” said Jason Haley, one of the three plaintiffs, who has lived in the city for 20 years. “It’s been so torturous I can’t sleep; I just leave the house or turn on some music until I fall asleep completely exhausted. It drives you insane. You also lose hope because you’re being ignored or dismissed. There’s no escape.”

Another resident, Elizabeth Rose, who isn’t involved in the suit, told the Guardian, “It sounds like an airplane engine, but it’s continuous; it’s incredibly loud.”

“I’ve been woken up at 2 am by it; I’ve been woken up at 3 am by it,” she continued. “I sometimes have to just get away from it because it makes me so angry.”

And Elon’s answer is to throw a comparatively minuscule amount of money at the less fortunate in order to expand his capitalist empire, regardless of who he displaces.

Again, either he has never seen a movie or classic TV show, or read any novel of any genre, or he’s just too dense and lacking in self-awareness to see himself in classic villains depicted across fiction for generations.

Or he just really enjoys being the villain.

It’s probably the latter — not that it would be hard to believe he doesn’t read.

SEE ALSO:

Elon Musk’s xAI Sued By NAACP Over Memphis Data Centers

Justin Pearson Fights For Environmental Justice And Community In Memphis