Elon Musk sells ‘all his homes’ to concentrate on space conquest

Like some other ambitious homeowners, Elon Musk noticed that planning his dream house was diverting his attention.

Like many an ambitious homeowner, Elon Musk eventually noticed that planning his dream house was diverting his attention from more pressing questions. Such as how to send humans to Mars.

So the billionaire chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX devised a characteristically ostentatious solution: he would sell off his entire property portfolio.

The plan gathered momentum during the week when Mr Musk, 48, put five of his properties in California up for sale for a combined $US97.5 million ($152m).

Four of the houses are clustered near to each other in Bel Air, one of greater Los Angeles’s most exclusive neighbourhoods. One of the smaller properties is a three-bedroom house once owned by the actor Gene Wilder. The fifth property is in Hillsborough, one of the most expensive areas of Silicon Valley.

They arrived on the market on Wednesday, just over a week after two of Mr Musk’s other mansions in Bel Air were listed for a combined $US39.5m. All seven homes have been posted on the property website Zillow and are listed simply as “for sale by owner”.

Mr Musk had flagged up the sales at the start of the month. “I am selling almost all physical possessions,” he tweeted on May 1. “Will own no house.”

A few days later the South African born entrepreneur told Joe Rogan, the comedian and podcast host, that he had collected so many houses because of “privacy issues where people would just come to my house and you know, start climbing over the walls and stuff”.

He “sort of like bought a house and some of the houses around my house”.

At first he wondered about how he could use the space to construct his ideal home from scratch. Then he had a moment of revelation. “Does it really make sense for me to spend time designing and building a house? Or should I be allocating that time to getting us to Mars?” He decided “I should probably do the latter.”

The property moves come in the midst of a frenetic period for Mr Musk. Last week he became a father for the sixth time. The boy is his first child with the singer Grimes and they named him X Æ A-12.

Business concerns then intervened as Mr Musk, who tweeted in March that “the coronavirus panic is dumb”, made himself a figurehead for the increasingly rancorous American debate over shutdown orders.

On Saturday he announced that Tesla, “the last car manufacturer left” in California, would move its headquarters and future programs to Texas or Nevada “immediately” because of his frustration with the restrictions on doing business during the pandemic.

He added that he would sue county officials for keeping the factory in Fremont closed. Then on Monday he reopened the plant in defiance of an order prohibiting the manufacture and assembly of non-essential goods.

The Alameda County authorities refrained from arresting him or any of the Tesla employees who reported for work. Some staff told reporters that they had felt pressured to return to work and unhappy with the risks, even though Mr Musk said in an email that if they “feel uncomfortable coming back to work at this time, please do not feel obligated to do so”.

One California state assembly woman, Lorena Gonzalez, a vocal critic of tech industry labour practices, expressed her thoughts in a terse tweet: “F*** Elon Musk”.

In his interview for the podcast Mr Musk hinted that he was selling his homes partly for spiritual reasons and to deny ammunition to his critics. He intends to rent but has not said where.

“Possessions kind of weigh you down,” he said. “They’re kind of an attack vector, you know? People say, ‘Hey, billionaire, you’ve got all this stuff.’ Well, now I don’t have stuff. Now what are you going to do?”

The Times