Elon Musk turns to Morgan Stanley to finance 5 California mansions

The bank provided $61M loans for the homes, including 4 in Bel Air

Elon Musk and one of his Bel Air homes (Credit: Getty Images and Redfin)
Elon Musk and one of his Bel Air homes (Credit: Getty Images and Redfin)

Billionaire futurist Elon Musk has taken out $61 million in mortgages on five California mansions.

Morgan Stanley provided the debt on the properties, which amount to $180,000 in monthly payments for Musk, according to Bloomberg.

The Tesla, Boring Company, and SpaceX founder took out loans on four of his homes in Bel Air, and one in the San Francisco Bay area city of Hillsborough, Bloomberg reported.

All of the loans represent new debt except one. That one is a refinance on the first Bel Air home Musk bought in 2012, a 1.7-acre estate above the Bel Air Country Club. Musk acquired another home next door in 2013, but turned it into a private school for his children and their friends.

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Such large mortgages are rare in the world of private home lending, but Musk isn’t alone among wealthy homeowners who prefer debt to cash. His neighbors in Bel Air, power couple Jay-Z and Beyoncé, took out a $52.8 million loan on a sprawling 30,000-square-foot spec mansion in the area in 2017.

In 2015, Musk added two more Bel Air properties to his portfolio. Two years later he dropped $24.3 million for an unfinished spec home in the exclusive neighborhood. But that wasn’t enough. A few weeks ago, he bought another home for $6.4 million.

In total, there were 230 mortgages of $10 million to $20 million last year. Around three quarters of those were taken out in the last five years, Bloomberg reported. [Bloomberg]Dennis Lynch