Cards Against Humanity is suing Elon Musk's SpaceX (and they're going to win)

While we can all agree that the headline isn't one any of us ever expected to see in our lifetimes, there it is: Yes, Cards Against Humanity, as in the makers of the card game of the same name, have filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk's SpaceX for wrecking a small parcel of land the company purchased bordering the Rio Grande and was maintaining as a wildlife refuge.

Well, the real reason the company organized the purchase the land was as protest to not-yet-seditionist Donald Trump's demanded border wall. 150,000 donors paid $15 each to purchase less than half an acre of pristine riverfront with the promise that it would remain pristine and not have one of Trump's demanded border erections slicing through it. And that would have worked out just fine, had not Musk started buying up land throughout the area in support of the environment-wrecking home of engineering YOLO Musk refers to as a launch facility. That facility is about three miles away from the CAH plot in question, but it didn't stop SpaceX from buying up the two plots immediately adjacent to CAH's still-pristine land to use as storage lots for various construction materials, vehicles, and whatever other debris the facility itself doesn't have room for.

So that's how this began. What happened next, eventually, is that since SpaceX owned the lots to the east and west of CAH's land, at some point it decided it needed more room to store unsorted general construction crap and, being a Musk-helmed company in Texas, apparently somebody or many somebodies in the company decided they'd just take whatever land was nearby. They brought in equipment to clear CAH's plot and started dumping even more general construction crap on that, too.

So now the land is trashed. The Muskbros bulldozed over the whole thing and turned it into an extension of their riverside debris collection. The satellite images show what happened.

Given that, you'd better believe CAH filed a lawsuit—and created a whole new website to explain what happened and what they plan on doing about it. They're asking for $15 million in damages, enough to refund $100 to each donor as compensation for Space X trashing the little plot.

You can rest assured that there's not a chance in hell they're not going to win something from Musk. Even in Texas, and even with Texas being at this point a land where laws only exist to whatever extent the most frothing appointed far-right judge thinks they do or don't on any particular morning. And if they don't win such an obvious open-and-shut case, that might be an even more interesting outcome because it'll give the world some new names of which Texas officials are crooked in which new, previously unreported ways.

All of that is what's already being reported in all the papers and websites. There's been little coverage, however, of how exactly it came to pass that SpaceX felt it could just bulldoze over somebody else's property to use for random pipe and equipment storage. It's left ambiguous; oh, something happened, yada yada, and oh look now the parcel of Texas grassland looks like a construction site where nobody's bothering to do any construction. Wild how that happened, but nobody's willing to speculate on the intentions of the multiple people inside SpaceX who would have had to sign off on the act of larceny.

I promise you, Elon Musk's companies have no staffing issues in their legal departments. They've got lawyers coming out their ears; if they all joined hands they could probably make a human chain leading from the property to the launch tower 3 miles away. Perhaps some low-level manager made the call; it wasn't a spur-of-the-moment thing, though, because the land had to be cleared with machinery before any of that stuff could then be dumped on it.

Cards Against Humanity's interactions with SpaceX have some hints of this whole thing being an intentional act.

How did this happen? Elon Musk’s SpaceX was building some space thing nearby, and he figured he could just dump his shit all over our gorgeous plot of land without asking. After we caught him, SpaceX gave us a 12-hour ultimatum to accept a lowball offer for less than half our land’s value. We said, “Go fuck yourself, Elon Musk. We’ll see you in court.”

Ah, well there we go. So it appears SpaceX's legal staff was either already aware of the land theft or was willing to fess up to it pretty darn quick when challenged, and it's especially telling that the response was well I guess the only thing to do is for you to sell us that plot ... for a steeply reduced price.

Yeah, that's fuckery.

Without more information we don't know quite how this really went down, and we may not ever, if SpaceX decides that whatever laptops have record of the events need to be stored directly under that SpaceX launch tower to test what rocket exhaust might do to them. Speculatively, however, this feels very, very similar to one of the oldest Rich Crooked Asshole moves to ever exist.

• Rich Crooked Asshole has land in an area and wants to expand, but other landowners are refusing to sell.

• Oh yeah? What a shame you're not selling. It would be horrible if something happened to that land, something that made it a lot less valuable and/or unusable for what you're currently using it for. Something like "we've decided to put experimental sewage composting facilities on either side of you." Or something like "we're going to build 10-story towers on either side of you, butting right up against the property line because we've already bribed our way through half of county government and don't have to follow zoning rules."

• Oh look, something like that just happened. Well, your property is pretty worthless now. We'll still take it off your hands, but we can't pay going rates. Sucks to be you, pal.

It's one of the oldest developer tricks to ever exist! It's been the plots of more movies and books and old-timey cartoons than you could hope to count! And it goes to the heart of our current environment of government-business corruption: If you are a big company, you are almost always better off breaking breaking laws and paying whatever token fines come your way than following the law in the first place. But you have to be a big company, because if you're not a big enough company to put up a fight when the government regulators come, you don't enjoy the same protections.

In California and Texas both, Musk appears to be the very personification of the tactic. Hurt people first, toss 'em a check afterwards or not at all. Never has one man been so grateful for our legal systems' distinctions between crimes committed by a corporation and ones committed by actual people.

There's no question as to whether this plot of land is really worth $15 million dollars: It's not. It never was. But it was in SpaceX's way, and SpaceX has lawyers who probably felt pretty confident that whoever the probably-unknown property owner was, they could be bullied quickly into submission once the plot had already been wrecked. They probably ought to have checked to make sure the property was not owned by an activist group with a record of going to elaborate lengths to fuck with Rich Crooked Assholes, but that's on them.

So yes, Cards Against Humanity should by all rights walk away with multiple millions of dollars because screw SpaceX for trying such a hoary, mustache-twirling bit of real estate crookery. SpaceX should be forced to pay a $5 million penalty just for having the gall to try moves stolen from Saturday morning cartoons and old radio dramas.

We'll see what happens. CAH points prominently to this Reuters article which hints strongly of crookery in the relationship between SpaceX and Texas officials in the region, go figure. and that will be worth keeping an eye on too.

But while we do, let's ask another question that most of these press reports are leaving out. I'm sorry, but what kind of Asshole Collective do you have to be to buy up slices of pristine Rio Grande riverside just so you can bulldoze them and turn them into open-air warehouses for random piles of construction junk?

It had to be riverside? You had the whole of South Texas to store that in, and your company said oh no, what we really need is to store all of this shit three miles away on the very very edge of the famous and environmentally sensitive Rio Grande? There was nowhere else, it had to be right on the river, god knows your steel pipe stockpile needs to be able to look out over the Rio and contemplate things rather than be stuck on literally any other plot in the county?

Hmm. That one feels especially dickish even for a company run by narcissistic racist sedition-backing neo-Nazi-boosting chud.