Getting to Know Austin Billionaire Joe Lonsdale

Most Austinites are unaware that our city is home to a far-right billionaire working diligently, and very effectively, to criminalize homelessness. That person is Joe Lonsdale, and VOCAL-TX, the grassroots homeless advocates, are staging an all-night vigil this Sunday at 8pm outside his think tank, the Cicero Institute. The vigil is part of VOCAL-TX’s Billionaire Backers of Hate campaign, which hopes to familiarize Austinites with the billionaires living among us who push policies that dehumanize the homeless, separate families, and harm the environment. 

“So many of the attacks that we’re facing in Austin are coming down from the federal and state level,” said VOCAL-TX’s Paulette Soltani, who is organizing the vigil. “And, sadly, we know that the federal level is so influenced by powerful billionaires. And there’s a set of billionaires that are supporting the Trump administration’s policies that are harming vulnerable people in Austin. They’re influencing our policies, influencing our politics and our elections in this state, and they’ve made Austin their home.”     

Lonsdale is one of these. He’s a billionaire in his mid-40s who made his fortune as a co-founder of the infamous defense contractor Palantir. He moved to Austin in 2020, the same year as his confidant, Elon Musk, bringing the Cicero Institute with him and ensconcing it at Rio Grande and 22nd Street, blocks from UT. Lonsdale has gone on to become a major figure in the Republican party, working alongside Musk to get Donald Trump elected president in 2024.

The Cicero Institute presents itself as a group of experts promoting capitalist solutions to healthcare and criminal justice issues. But it’s best known for its efforts to criminalize homelessness. The group was a major player in getting Texas to adopt a statewide camping ban in 2021. It has gotten similar measures passed in at least eight other states. In 2025, Trump signed an executive order echoing the Cicero Institute’s proposals, which reject the “Housing First” model that emphasizes the importance of providing homes for unhoused people rather than institutionalizing them. 

The Cicero Institute also provides model legislation – language that state legislators can use to write laws – to Republicans who want to loosen involuntary civil commitment guidelines, so that homeless people suffering from mental illness or drug addiction can be rounded up and given psychiatric treatment against their will. On its website, the Cicero Institute pushes for changes to the laws governing involuntary civil commitment “to extend treatment requirements for those most severely ill from months to years.” 

In May, Utah legislators rejected a Trump-backed plan sponsored by Gov. Spencer Cox that would have rounded up as many as 1,300 homeless Salt Lake City residents and forcibly medicated some of them at a camp on the edge of town. According to reporting in The New York Times, the legislators balked because of the plan’s costs and potential impact on civil liberties. However, they did approve “significant new money and discretion to provide the services [Cox] wanted at the campus, including programs that emphasize or compel treatment.” 

Earlier this month, Louisiana’s governor approved a homelessness criminalization bill promoted by the Cicero Institute called the Streets to Success Act. Under the new law, people repeatedly convicted of public camping can be offered treatment and probation, rather than prison, but are charged for the program’s cost. In the very likely event that a homeless person is unable to pay, a judge can waive the program’s costs or compel the unhoused person to work for free to pay off the debt. In an interview with Filter magazine, Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center compared the new measure to the Jim Crow laws of the past, saying Louisiana legislators are “not really interested in getting people help, they’re using the unhoused to build more camps, to normalize forced labor.” 

Here in Texas, with the 2027 legislative session six months away, Republican legislators are considering whether to amend state law to make it easier to detain and medicate homeless people against their will. In March, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick instructed the Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee to evaluate “competency restoration for criminally charged [homeless] individuals awaiting trial, as well as processes for civil in-patient and out-patient commitments.” He also ordered the committee to “make recommendations to prioritize the most acute populations for treatment.”

Lonsdale is thinking about the upcoming legislative session too. On May 20, he went on Fox News’ Will Cain Show to urge state Republicans to subvert democracy in Austin. “We need to work with Governor Abbott, we need the Legislature to step up in 2027 – our next session – we need to take away some of these rights from Austin,” Lonsdale said. He reiterated the sentiment on X, saying, “For decades, we let progressives ruin great cities like Austin” – oblivious to the dissonance of Austin being simultaneously “ruined” and “great” – and urging state Republicans to “take more power.” 

Soltani said that Lonsdale’s money and political influence makes Republicans like Abbott capitulate. “They fold, they follow, they fall in line, and this is exactly the fear that we have in Austin,” Soltani said. “These billionaire backers of hate, when they want things to happen, our governor follows suit, and so does our Legislature. So whether it’s Elon Musk doing whatever he wants in our state, or the lesser-known Joe Lonsdale, these guys are governing our state and making policy decisions.”

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