Cards Against Humanity sues SpaceX, alleging trespassing near Texas border

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, with the company's Falcon Heavy rocket at Launch Pad 39A at Nasa's Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Photo / Todd Anderson, The New York Times

Cards Against Humanity, the company behind the deliberately distasteful party game, has filed a US$15 million lawsuit against SpaceX, alleging the aerospace behemoth led by Elon Musk trespassed on land it owns in Texas near the border with Mexico.

Cards Against Humanity bought the property in 2017 as a part of a stunt aimed at impeding then President Donald Trump’s plans to build a wall along the southern border. About 150,000 people donated US$15 ($24)to its crowdsourcing campaign to purchase the “pristine” vacant land, the lawsuit filed in the Cameron County District Court on Thursday said.

But for at least six months, SpaceX has “treated the property as its own”, the lawsuit says, accusing SpaceX and/or its contractors of trespassing and, without permission, clearing the land of vegetation, laying down gravel, bringing in generators, and using it to park vehicles and store construction materials. SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The property is located in a once-quiet part of coastal South Texas that has been transformed by the development of SpaceX’s Starbase industrial complex. One of the company’s four active launch sites, Starbase includes a 146m rocket launch and catch tower and has been described by SpaceX as “one of the world’s first commercial spaceports designed for orbital missions”.

While Starbase brought more than 2100 jobs into the region, it has caused consternation among some locals, according to a Reuters investigation published on Friday, which first reported the Cards Against Humanity lawsuit.

Before SpaceX arrived, the game company’s property was one where “wild horses galloped freely in the Texas moonlight”, Cards Against Humanity said in an online statement about the lawsuit.

The court filing includes before-and-after photos showing land covered in long grass and plants, followed by later images of dirt covered with what appear to be construction materials and equipment.

“SpaceX has ignored CAH’s rights to the property, essentially displacing CAH and depriving CAH of any use whatsoever of the property,” the lawsuit says.

Cards Against Humanity also claims that its business relationships have been damaged by SpaceX using its property because of the aerospace company’s connection with Musk, its founder and CEO. The filing points to allegations of sexism and racism made by workers at Tesla, another company led by Musk; statements Musk has made that were criticised as anti-semitic; and Musk’s support for Trump and for building a wall along the US-Mexico border.

“These are just a few examples among many other acts overtly offensive to those who contributed money” to buy the land in 2017, the lawsuit said.

Cards Against Humanity’s primary product is a Mad Libs-style card game in which players fill in the blanks of a sentence with a word or phrase in their hand of cards, with the most outrageous sentence winning the round. Marketed as a “party game for horrible people”, it often results in phrases that are intentionally off-colour.

The company has engaged in a number of stunts, ranging from the silly to the political, since it launched after a crowdfunding campaign that started in 2010. Through an associated super PAC called the Nuisance Committee, Cards Against Humanity funded pranks such as a 2016 billboard in Detroit that read in Arabic: “Donald Trump, he can’t read this, but he is afraid of it.”

Although in Thursday’s lawsuit Cards Against Humanity is described as an organisation that stands up “against injustice”, the company has also been accused of racism and sexism by workers, prompting one co-founder to step down, gaming media outlet Polygon reported in 2020. It has also removed cards from its deck that had been criticised as transphobic and that referenced rape, according to Polygon.