A friend of mine brought this up at dinner a few weeks back — “didn’t Elon Musk sell his house or something?” — and honestly, the answer took longer to explain than either of us expected. Because yes, he did. But also there’s a tiny house involved, and a giant compound, and none of it happened the way most headlines make it sound.
So let’s actually walk through it properly.
Back When He Lived Like a Normal Billionaire
For most of the 2010s, Musk’s home situation wasn’t interesting at all. He’d bought several properties in Bel-Air over the years, clustered near one another, and his main place — over 20,000 square feet — cost him $17 million back in 2012. That’s… pretty standard for someone running Tesla and SpaceX. Nothing here would’ve made news on its own.
Then came May 2020, and one tweet flipped the whole story. Musk announced he was getting rid of nearly all his physical possessions, adding that he’d “own no house” from that point forward. A lot of people brushed it off as him being dramatic on Twitter again. Fair assumption, given his history. Except this time he wasn’t kidding around.
The Sell-Off Actually Happened
Give him credit for follow-through, at least. By the end of 2020 — so, within about seven months — four of those Bel-Air homes were off his hands, bringing in around $62 million combined. Around the same time, he packed up and moved to Texas after living in California for close to twenty years.
One house took a bit longer to shake loose. A 47-acre property up in Hillsborough, near the Bay Area, with a music room, a library, a pool, seven bedrooms — the whole estate package.Back in 2017, that purchase cost him $23.4 million. By the time he put it up for sale, the asking price had climbed to somewhere around $32 million. . He’d talked about that particular property with more affection than the others over the years, so it clearly wasn’t just another line item to him.
By mid-2021, it was gone too. Every single property. A portfolio that not long before had been worth close to $100 million had been completely wiped clean.
Then Things Got Weird
Here’s the part that genuinely surprises people, even now. Around June 2021, Musk mentioned online that his actual home — his primary residence — was a house worth roughly $50,000, sitting near SpaceX’s Starbase site down in Boca Chica. And he wasn’t buying it. He was renting it. From SpaceX. His own company.
He talked about it in an interview too, describing a small three-bedroom place he’d picked mostly for the location, not the size. Multiple outlets connected it to a Boxabl Casita — one of those foldable prefab units that gets trucked in flat and opens up into around 400 square feet. A studio apartment, basically, parked a short walk from where Starship rockets get tested.
Think about that combination for a second. Richest man alive. Smallest possible house.
A few reasons people point to for why he’d do this:
- No commute — he’s right there at the launch site
- Less to look after, fewer things pulling his attention
- It also just fits the whole no-frills persona he’s built up
Real minimalism, calculated image, or some mix of both? Hard to say for sure. But this hasn’t been a one-time headline — it’s held up as his reported setup for years, which suggests there’s more to it than a passing phase.
Meanwhile, Everything Around Him Kept Growing
Funny thing is, while his personal house shrank down to almost nothing, his footprint in Texas exploded in the opposite direction. Out near Bastrop County, roughly 45 minutes outside Austin, his companies have built out this sprawling operations hub — Boring Company facilities, an expanded SpaceX site, X’s headquarters, all clustered together. People locally started calling it Snailbrook. It’s grown past ten square miles at this point, with more employee amenities being added regularly.
So you get this odd picture: a man living in something the size of a garden shed, surrounded by an ever-expanding corporate territory he built from scratch.
Where That Leaves Things Today
If you’re looking for a mansion tour, there isn’t one — not anymore, not one he actually owns. Bel-Air’s gone. Hillsborough’s gone. What’s left is a small rented house in South Texas that, as far as public reporting shows, is still where he lays his head.
You can read that however you want — genuine commitment to the work, or a well-managed story about a billionaire who “doesn’t care about stuff.” Either way, the basic facts about the elon musk house haven’t really changed in years.
