“Will Own No House”

Most billionaires collect houses, but in 2020 Elon Musk announced he would get rid of his.

The pledge

On May 1, 2020, Elon Musk wrote on X, the platform then called Twitter, "I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house." Coming from someone worth many billions of dollars, it was a striking thing to say out loud. Over the following months he sold a series of luxury homes, mostly in the Los Angeles area.

He sold Gene Wilder's former house for $7 million to Wilder's nephew, Jordan Walker-Pearlman, and lent him $6.7 million of the price. In 2024 he moved to foreclose after the loan went unpaid.

Why he did it

Elon Musk gave a few overlapping reasons. One was personal: he has said that possessions are a burden and a distraction, and that he wanted fewer things standing between him and his work. Another was about how a very rich person is seen. For a billionaire who argues that his fortune exists to fund big missions, selling the mansions was a way to back the argument.

What it says about how he sees money

Elon Musk talks about his fortune as fuel for the things he is trying to build, above all making humanity a multiplanet species, rather than as money to enjoy. Selling the houses lined up his life with that story. In October 2024 The New York Times reported that he had bought about $35 million of adjoining property in Austin, Texas, for his children and their mothers, but he told Page Six he did not own a compound in Austin and was not building one.

The bottom line

The "own no house" pledge was one of Elon Musk's clearest public statements about money. He sold the mansions, and in 2021 he wrote that his main home was a house of about $50,000 that he rented from SpaceX at Starbase, the company's launch site in South Texas.