WAITING FOR ELON

It’s not easy to compete with Miami and Austin for high-tech jobs. But Adelanto, Calif., which boasts a light regulatory environment, an enthusiastic city manager, and plenty of dirt, is giving it a shot

- Sarah McBride

One night two Januaries ago, Jessie Flores made a series of frantic calls and texts to his deputies, with a request: Could they clear their schedules to get to Elon Musk’s offices in Los Angeles for a meeting?

Flores is the city manager of Adelanto, Calif., a scrubby, mountain-shadowed city of 37,000 in the southwestern Mojave Desert known chiefly for its prisons. Adelanto’s mayor, Gabriel Reyes, is a currency trader who works out of a ramshackle strip-mall office in nearby Hesperia. But mayor is a part-time gig here, and the city manager, who’s appointed by the city council, is the full-time chief executive—in charge of finance, land use, and economic development.

Over lunch with the mayor and a county supervisor, Flores had recently learned of an unusual opportunity. Musk—whose two companies, SpaceX and Tesla Inc., had made him either the world’s richest or second-richest man, depending on the day—had a sideline in rapid transit. His Boring Co. is developing a point-to-point travel system that moves passengers in 12-foot-diameter tunnels. It recently finished a tunnel below the Las Vegas Convention Center and is in talks to build one in Ontario, Calif. The county supervisor, who’d worked on the Ontario project, mentioned to Flores that Musk was looking for a place with enough room and a flexible enough regulatory environment for the Boring Co. where it could practice digging as it improves its tunneling machines. Adelanto, the supervisor suggested, might be a good fit.