From Mansions to Modular Homes: Elon Musk’s Housing Shift

Most people who get rich buy bigger houses. For about eight years, Elon Musk did exactly that. Then he did something almost no one at his level has done. He sold nearly all of it and moved into a small home near a rocket launch site in South Texas.

The full Elon Musk house timeline, from Bel Air mansions to his current base, is laid out well by The Pinnacles List, which tracks each property with reported purchase and sale prices. This piece looks at the bigger picture. What did he own, why did it change, and what does his move toward modular living say about how we build homes, and buildings in general, today?

The Mansion Years

Musk’s big buying run started in 2012 with a Bel Air mansion in Los Angeles, bought for about $17 million. It covered roughly 16,000 square feet, with six bedrooms, a two-storey library, a wine cellar and a tennis court. It sat a short drive from the SpaceX factory in Hawthorne, which mattered for someone running two companies at once.

Over the next few years he bought several more homes on the same street. One was the former house of actor Gene Wilder, a modest ranch he paid about $6.8 million for in 2013. In 2017 he added a historic estate south of San Francisco, built in 1916 on about 47 acres, for roughly $23 million.

By 2019, he owned a cluster of California properties worth well over $100 million. It was the classic tech founder playbook. Buy space, buy privacy, and buy the house next door so no one else can.

The Decision to Sell Almost Everything

In May 2020, Musk posted that he was selling almost all his physical possessions and would “own no house.” Plenty of people took it as a joke. It turned out he meant it.

Over the next year and a half, the Bel Air homes went one by one. The main mansion sold in 2020 for about $29 million. A developer bought the group of nearby houses. The Bay Area estate sold in late 2021 for around $30 million.

The Gene Wilder house had the most human ending. Wilder’s nephew asked Musk not to tear it down, and Musk sold it to him for about $7 million, barely more than he paid. Around the same time, Musk moved his own base, and Tesla’s headquarters, from California to Texas.

Life Near Starbase

After the sell-off, Musk settled near SpaceX’s launch site at Boca Chica, at the southern tip of Texas. Reports say he rents a small house there from SpaceX, valued at around $50,000. He has said he converted the garage to add space.

The home most people picture, though, is a Boxabl Casita. It’s a factory-built unit of about 375 square feet that folds up for shipping and opens on site in a matter of hours. Musk has said this unit mainly serves as a guest house, not his main home.

In 2025, the area around the launch site voted to become its own city, called Starbase. For now, that’s the closest thing he has to a fixed address. As with anyone, that could change.

Why Modular Building Is Catching On

Modular construction means building most of a structure in a factory, then shipping it to the site in finished sections. Because the work happens indoors, weather doesn’t cause delays and quality is easier to control. A modular home can go from order to move-in far faster than a traditional build.

The trade-off is space and flexibility. A 375-square-foot unit suits one person or a guest, not a big family. Custom layouts are also harder, since factory lines work best with standard sizes.

The same thinking has spread well beyond housing. Modern data centres, including many around London, increasingly use prefabricated modules for power, cooling and server halls. Operators can add capacity in planned blocks instead of building one giant hall up front. It’s the same logic behind a modular home: build what you need now, in a repeatable unit, and add more when demand grows.

Facts vs. Rumours

Not every story about where Musk lives holds up. In late 2024, news reports said he had bought a group of homes near Austin as a family compound, reportedly worth about $35 million. Musk publicly denied owning a compound there.

Until public records or the owner confirm a claim like that, it’s best treated as unverified. Wealthy buyers often use trusts and companies, which makes ownership hard to trace. His companies have also been linked to planned worker housing near Austin, but a planned project isn’t the same as a home someone lives in.

What We Can Take From It

Musk’s housing story is extreme, but the patterns behind it are common. Homes tend to follow work. When his focus moved to rockets in South Texas, a cluster of Los Angeles mansions stopped making sense. Plenty of people make smaller versions of the same move when a job, a family change or rising costs shift their priorities.

It also shows that big isn’t always better. Large homes bring upkeep, staff, insurance and running costs. A compact, well-built space close to where you spend your days can be the more practical choice, whether you’re a billionaire or not.

From mansions to modular homes, his path is a reminder that the right building is the one that fits how you actually live and work. And as modular methods spread from houses to offices and data centres, that idea is only getting more relevant.