Elon Musk Says He's Homeless, Crashes On Friends' Couches

Billionaire Elon Musk, the man who wants to buy Twitter, says that he does not actually own a house and chooses to sleep on friends' couches instead.

According to Forbes, his net worth is $269.5 billion. And, yet, the Tesla founder told TED’s Chris Anderson that he is staying at friends’ houses.

“I don’t even own a place right now, I’m literally staying at friends’ places,” Musk said.

In their conversation, the father-of-seven revealed that he doesn’t have his own house and instead chooses to stay with friends.

“If I travel to the Bay Area, which is where most of Tesla’s engineering is, I basically rotate through friends’ spare bedrooms,” he explained.

The SpaceX founder insists that he does not spend “billions of dollars a year in personal consumption” when asked about the wealth disparity between billionaires and everyday Americans.

“For sure, it would be very problematic if I was spending billions of dollars a year in personal consumption, but that is not the case,” Musk said. “It’s not as though my personal consumption is high,” he noted, although he did confess to owning a private plane that he uses for work.

“If I don’t use the plane, then I have less hours to work,” Musk explained.

In May 2020, Musk famously tweeted, “I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house.”

However, he followed it up with, “Just one stipulation on sale: I own Gene Wilder’s old house. It cannot be torn down or lose any its soul.”

In June 2021, crypto Youtuber Matt Wallace tweeted, “Elon Musk lives very modestly by billionaire standards. Only 1 residential house (plus 1 for events). @ElonMusk uses less resources than most multi-millionaires despite working way harder. Plus $ sitting in stocks, makes each $ outside worth more exactly proportionally.”

The same day, Musk hopped on the post to explain that his primary residence is a $50,000 dollar SpaceX rental.

“My primary home is literally a ~$50k house in Boca Chica / Starbase that I rent from SpaceX,” Musk tweeted. “It’s kinda awesome though. Only house I own is the events house in the Bay Area. If I sold it, the house would see less use, unless bought by a big family, which might happen some day.”

Despite his lack of personal housing, Musk has set his sights on taking over the social media service Twitter. He has been quietly buying up shares in the company since January and is facing a lawsuit for failing to disclose when he acquired a 5% stake in the company, as required by the SEC.

Although Musk was invited to join Twitter's board of directors shortly after he required a more than 9% stake in the company at the beginning of April, he rejected the invitation and later expressed interest in buying the company in text messages sent to the Twitter board chair Bret Taylor.

Musk has offered to buy the social media company for "$54.20 per share in cash," according to the text messages, which is estimated to be around $43.4 billion dollars. In response, Twitter has adopted what is known as a poison pill defense to prevent a possible takeover.