Musk rents small home
If you were one of the richest people on Earth, where would you live? An austere estate, luxury beach house or city penthouse all come to mind. All extravagant, doubtless spacious.
Not so Elon Musk. The 50-yearold, whose net worth is more than $185 billion, lives in a prefab tiny home that costs a mere $49,500. Musk revealed in June that he rented a 375-square-foot unit from his Spacex company in Boca Chica, Texas.
“It's kinda awesome, though,” he tweeted. “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.”
Though his tweet is a couple of months old, Musk may have been living in the diminutive digs for much longer. Las Vegas company Boxabl posted a Youtube video last November saying it installed a Casita in Boca Chica for a “top secret customer” and showed the house-in-a-box being delivered on a flatbed truck and set up on site.
“You look at housing right now. It's slow, expensive, built by hands. The methods haven't really changed in a hundred years,” Boxabl co-founder Galiano Tiramani says in the video.
“It's simply not working. That's evident around the world. There are housing affordability issues everywhere.”
Tiramani explains that Boxabl's houses use assembly line principles set out by Henry Ford at the start of the 20th century, ideas that previously eluded the housing market because of challenges in shipping logistics and cost.
Boxabl, he says, has overcome those problems and allows houses to be mass produced in a factory like many of our other modern amenities.
The Casita home can be folded down from 20 feet to about 81/2 feet while it's transported on a truck or towed by a pickup truck. Although shipping could still cost $2 to $10 a mile from Boxabl's headquarters, customers can have the homes sent overseas or by rail.
Setup is simple. Almost all the finishes are done in the factory, including electrical, plumbing and HVAC, so once the Casita arrives at its destination, it just needs a few hours to be unfolded and then attached to its foundation and utilities. The interior resembles a studio apartment, with a kitchen, bathroom, living-room and bedroom.
If a tiny home is a tad too tiny for your taste, you can stack or connect Casitas to increase the square footage. Tiramani tells Insider the company plans to sell larger units in the future. He adds that Boxabl has a waiting list of 47,000 customers.
“The target audience heard about this beforehand, and then the Musk press brought in general audience interest, maybe someone who didn't care about housing,” he says.