In a sentence that would not have made sense 20 years ago, the world’s most powerful private-sector space company has settled a lawsuit from a vulgar card game company because the former illegally dumped space trash on the latter’s land it bought with your money to fight President Donald Trump. You see, way back in 2017, Cards Against Humanity ran a crowdfunding campaign to buy a piece of land on the Texas-Mexico border with the explicit purpose of denying it to Trump’s border wall. This worked, in the sense that there is no border wall there. And then it didn’t work, in the sense that SpaceX started tossing trash onto it from its nearby new company town, Starbase. Oops.
Being the subtle, dignified, and tasteful company it is, Cards Against Humanity immediately spun up elonowesyou100dollars.com and sued Musk in 2024, promising to divvy out the spoils amongst those who crowdfunded the land in the first place. It wanted $15 million in damages. Amazingly, SpaceX disagreed, and the case looked like it was headed to court. Then, according to a recent email from the game company, SpaceX “did the legal equivalent of throwing dust in our eyes and kicking us in the balls.” That must have been some discovery session.
Winning and also not winning out of court
Apparently, SpaceX’s highly paid lawyers tried a novel technique: literally admitting on the record that the space company had trespassed. You might think that the case would be a guaranteed win for Cards Against Humanity, but this is the American legal system we’re talking about. It’s expensive. As CAH told TechCrunch, the trial “would have cost more than what we were likely to win… Under Texas law, we likely wouldn’t be able to recoup our legal fees.”
So, a settlement it was to be instead. Under the agreement, SpaceX has cleaned up its space mess and left the land. In the meantime, though it has no spoils to divvy out, it promises to send the funders of the original crowdsourcing campaign a new card expansion for free. CAH also promises to restore the land to its former beauty, which may be difficult given that rockets keep exploding at Starbase.
