"After all, the great dream of the West has always been to rebuild Rome."Images via @ateliermissor_ on X, Mother Jones illustration
On Thursday, a group of men dressed like extras from Les Misérables erected a giant statue outside Elon Musk’s company town of Starbase, Texas: a 50-foot bronze rendition of the Titan Prometheus. Building a godlike figure in honor of the world’s richest man reportedly cost the sculptors, of the French outfit Atelier Missor, $1 million of their own funds.
Atelier Missor, active since 2021, describes itself on X as a “classical foundry in Paris, on its way to building a new Rome.” Its founder, Missor Movahed Ghaleh Nouri, has claimed he was drawn to pursue classical sculpture after receiving a vision of Napoleon I while wandering the Place Vendôme in Paris. His staff wear identical tan suspenders, billowy shirts, and unkempt facial hair, and—per previous versions of their website—spent much of the first half of the 2020s producing bronze and clay busts of such figures as (of course) Napoleon, Nietzsche, and Jordan Peterson.
In a now-deleted mission statement, Movahed appears to allude to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests as one of the reasons he started his 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.”
Across their social media channels, the foundry now posts about bringing back the West and bemoans modern artistic sensibilities. “Make art so epic it will raise the birthrate,” they say. Nor have they forgotten their particular commitment to white, European manhood.
After first arriving in the United States last year with help from the Peter Thiel–linked 1517 venture capital fund, the men of Atelier Missor wasted no time ingratiating themselves with the American right. They welded an 11-foot bronze George Washington for Trump’s “Freedom 250” celebrations. (They also, judging by their posts, appear to have acquired cowboy hats.)
“You cannot just imagine a view of the world and impose it,” Movahed reportedly said in June of 2025. “You have to submit to the dream that unites us—the dream of Western civilization.”
To that end, his foundry has spent the past year flirting hard with Elon Musk.
But the statue—which now hoists its torch into the sky and teeters, plinthless, on the ground—is not on Starbase property. Nor is it made of titanium, as its sculptors initially planned. Instead, it sits by the side of a Texas road about ten miles away.
Neither SpaceX nor Atelier Missor immediately responded to a request for comment.
Rewarding their months of desperate posting—and real, actual statue construction—Atelier Missor recieved curt recognition from their idol on October 1st.
“Nice work,” Elon posted.
