A French sculpture studio erected a 50-foot bronze statue of Prometheus, the fire-bearing Titan, along a road near Starbase, Texas, Elon Musk’s company town, this week, capping a year of efforts to win the billionaire’s attention, Mother Jones reported on Friday.
The statue, a hollow welded figure hoisting a torch into the sky with no plinth beneath it, went up overnight on Wednesday. It does not stand on SpaceX property; it sits beside a Texas road about 10 miles away. The studio had initially planned to build it in titanium. It is bronze.
The sculptors, a Paris outfit called Atelier Missor, reportedly spent $1 million of their own funds on the project.
The foundry, active since 2021, calls itself on X a “classical foundry in Paris, on its way to building a new Rome.” Its founder, Missor Movahed Ghaleh Nouri, has said he turned to classical sculpture after receiving a vision of Napoleon I while wandering the Place Vendôme in Paris. His staff wear matching tan suspenders, billowing shirts and unkempt facial hair, and spent much of the early 2020s producing bronze and clay busts of Napoleon, Nietzsche and Jordan Peterson.
In a now-deleted mission statement, Mr. Nouri appeared to cite the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests as a reason he started the foundry. “I was shocked to see ignorant people tearing down statues,” he wrote. “These fools who weren’t even in the same league as those they were trying to destroy. These ungrateful people who had never done anything in their lives.” On social media the studio now posts about bringing back the West and complains about modern art. “Make art so epic it will raise the birthrate,” its members say.
The group arrived in the United States last year with help from the 1517 Fund, a venture capital firm linked to Peter Thiel, and welded an 11-foot bronze George Washington for President Trump’s “Freedom 250” celebrations. Judging by its posts, it has also acquired cowboy hats.
“You cannot just imagine a view of the world and impose it,” Mr. Nouri reportedly said in June 2025. “You have to submit to the dream that unites us, the dream of Western civilization.”
The effort earned a brief acknowledgment from its target. “Nice work,” Mr. Musk posted on Oct. 1. Neither SpaceX nor the foundry responded to requests for comment.