Elon Musk lives in a $50,000 prefabricated home in Boca Chica, Texas, near the SpaceX Starbase facility. The house, built by a startup called Boxabl, covers roughly 375 square feet (35 square meters). It stands in sharp contrast to the mansions he owned before 2020, back when his Bel-Air properties alone were worth over $70 million combined. That gap between net worth and living space is the whole reason the Elon Musk house keeps showing up in headlines.
Where Does Elon Musk Live Now?
Musk’s primary residence sits in Boca Chica Village, Cameron County, Texas, a few minutes from the SpaceX Starbase launch site. He’s owned the property since around 2021, after selling off nearly all his California real estate the year before. Locals in the area are sparse. Starbase itself, incorporated as its own municipality in 2025, now functions almost like a company town built around the rocket program.
Musk also spends time in Austin. Court and public records tie him to a property in West Lake Hills, an upscale suburb close to the Tesla Gigafactory Texas. He splits his schedule between the two homes, using Boca Chica for SpaceX work and Austin for time with his children.
Inside the Elon Musk House in Boca Chica, Texas
The Elon Musk house in Boca Chica is a Boxabl Casita, a foldable, factory-built module that ships flat and unfolds on site. It’s roughly 20 feet by 20 feet and includes a kitchen, living area, bedroom, and bathroom, all inside that single footprint.
Size and Layout
The unit measures about 375 to 400 square feet (35 to 37 sq m), depending on the source cited. Musk converted part of the layout to fit his needs, reportedly using a foldable Murphy bed to free up floor space during the day. There’s no second story, no separate wings, nothing that resembles a traditional house plan.
Interior Features
Reports describe a compact kitchen with a sink, oven, microwave, and dishwasher, plus a living area anchored by a wall-mounted television and a sofa that doubles as a bed. The bathroom includes a shower, toilet, and sink, built into a space smaller than most walk-in closets in his former Bel-Air homes. A rare photo shared by biographer Walter Isaacson in 2023 showed Musk seated at a plain wood table inside the home, phone in hand, the kitchen visible behind him.
Why Musk Chose a Tiny Home
Musk announced in May 2020, on social media, that he intended to sell almost all his physical possessions and own no house at all. He tied the decision to his long-term goal of funding a Mars colonization program through SpaceX, framing large real estate holdings as an unnecessary distraction. The Boca Chica home became the practical result of that pledge, close to his rocket operations and cheap enough that it barely registers against his net worth.
How Much Is the Elon Musk House Worth?
The Boca Chica Boxabl unit cost around $50,000, making it one of the least expensive primary residences owned by any billionaire in the United States. For comparison, his four remaining Bel-Air mansions sold as a package in December 2020 for $61.88 million combined, more than a thousand times the price of the home he lives in today.
His Austin-area property carries a different price tag entirely. Estimates for the West Lake Hills compound run between $6 million and $17 million, depending on which reports and which parcels within the area are counted. If the figure lands closer to the lower end, it still dwarfs the Boca Chica home by more than a hundred times.
Elon Musk’s Austin Compound
Musk’s Austin property functions as a family residence, separate from his SpaceX-adjacent home in Boca Chica. He bought the home around 2022, and it’s tied to his children and their mothers rather than to his own day-to-day base of operations.
West Lake Hills Property Details
The compound sits in a gated, tree-lined area of West Lake Hills, roughly 15 minutes from the Tesla Gigafactory. Reports describe a main residence plus several nearby homes, some purchased through limited liability companies (LLCs) connected to Musk’s associates rather than his own name directly. The arrangement keeps his children close together while giving each household its own space.
Zoning and Privacy Disputes
Security concerns followed Musk to Austin. The New York Times reported that he erected a 16-foot chain-link fence around the property, ten feet taller than local code allows, which put him at odds with the West Lake Hills Zoning and Planning Commission. City officials said the fence and an accompanying gate violated six separate ordinances and lacked the required permits. That dispute is one of the few verified, documented conflicts tied to any Elon Musk house, and it’s still unresolved as of the most recent public reporting.
Every Mansion Elon Musk Has Sold
Musk sold seven California properties between 2020 and 2021, worth a combined $127 million, closing the final sale that November. Each one tells a slightly different story about how his real estate priorities shifted over the previous decade.
The Bel-Air Estate on Chalon Road
Musk first rented this Chalon Road mansion in 2010, then bought it outright in 2012 for $17 million. The property spans over 16,000 square feet (1,486 sq m) and includes six or seven bedrooms, depending on the listing cited, along with a wine cellar, tennis court, and views of the Bel-Air Country Club. He sold it in 2020 for $29.72 million to William Ding, a Chinese billionaire and blockchain investor. That’s a profit of nearly $13 million over eight years.
Gene Wilder’s Former Home
Musk bought this house in 2013 for $6.75 million, drawn to its history as the longtime residence of actor Gene Wilder. Rather than living there himself, he turned it into Ad Astra, a private school for his own children and the kids of some SpaceX and Tesla employees. When he sold the property in 2020 for $7 million, he added one condition: the buyer, Wilder’s nephew Jordan Walker-Pearlman, couldn’t tear it down or alter its character.
The Brentwood Property
This boomerang-shaped house, purchased in 2014 for roughly $3.7 million, sat about 15 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Floor-to-ceiling windows and dense privacy hedges defined the exterior. Musk sold it quietly in 2019, ahead of his broader public sell-off, for close to $3.9 million.
Four More Bel-Air Mansions
Between 2015 and 2019, Musk added four more properties near his existing Bel-Air holdings, spending roughly $54.95 million total. Developer Ardie Tavangarian bought all four in a single December 2020 transaction for $61.88 million, wrapping up most of Musk’s Los Angeles portfolio in one deal.
The Hillsborough Estate
Known as Guignécourt, this 100-year-old mansion near San Francisco sits on roughly 47 acres (19 hectares) of land, with nine bedrooms and nine and a half bathrooms. Musk bought it in 2017 for about $23.4 million. He listed it for $35 million in 2020, though the sale didn’t finalize until 2021, when entrepreneur Kirill Evstratov purchased it for around $30 million.
Why Did Elon Musk Sell All His Houses?
Musk sold nearly his entire real estate portfolio to fund SpaceX’s Mars program and reduce what he called “attack vectors” tied to owning physical assets. He explained the reasoning on a Joe Rogan podcast appearance, describing large possessions as liabilities rather than status markers. The announcement came the same month he tweeted that he would own no house going forward, a pledge he’s mostly kept, aside from the smaller properties tied directly to his work and family.
Elon Musk’s Future Real Estate Projects
Musk is currently developing Snailbrook, a company town near Austin built for employees of SpaceX and The Boring Company. It’s the most concrete of his newer real estate ventures, though not without controversy.
Snailbrook, Texas
The development spans somewhere between 3,500 and 6,000 acres (1,416 to 2,428 hectares), with modular housing units starting around $800 a month. Plans submitted for the project describe 110 residences to start, with room to expand. Texas law requires 201 residents before a settlement can incorporate as its own town, a threshold Snailbrook hasn’t yet crossed. Critics have compared the concept to older company towns, where employers historically controlled housing, wages, and daily life for workers in ways that limited their independence.
Reported and Unconfirmed Projects
A few other projects tied to Musk remain unverified. Some outlets have referenced “Project 42,” an unbuilt concept for an all-glass home near Tesla’s Austin headquarters, though nothing confirms it has moved past the planning stage. Rumors about a large waterfront property in Miami have circulated as well, without documented purchase records to back them up. Readers should treat both as speculation rather than fact until public filings or confirmed sales surface.
How Musk’s Housing Choices Compare to Other Billionaires
Musk’s Boca Chica home is unusually modest compared to properties owned by other billionaires in his net worth range. Most ultra-wealthy individuals hold onto multiple large estates as both residences and investments. Musk went the opposite direction, cutting his real estate footprint down to a tiny prefab unit and one family compound. Other tech founders, including several in the Bay Area, still maintain sprawling primary residences worth tens of millions of dollars, making Musk’s approach an outlier rather than the norm.
Conclusion
The Elon Musk house story runs against every assumption about billionaire real estate. A prefab home worth $50,000 sits a few minutes from a rocket launch pad, while a quieter family compound in Austin handles the parts of his life that need more space and privacy. Between those two properties lies a decade of Bel-Air mansions, a century-old California estate, and a private school built inside a dead actor’s former home. Snailbrook adds a forward-looking chapter, though claims about a Miami mansion or an unbuilt glass house near Tesla’s headquarters remain unconfirmed. What’s documented paints a clear picture: Musk downsized dramatically starting in 2020, and nothing in the public record since then shows him reversing course.
