Where’s Elon? Maybe house-hunting in Texas

Does the SpaceX founder live in a modest rental or an Austin billionaire’s lakeside mansion?

Tesla and SpaceX founder, Elon Musk (Getty Images, iStock)
Tesla and SpaceX founder, Elon Musk (Getty Images, iStock)

Keeping up with celebrity billionaire Elon Musk isn’t easy – especially when it comes to real estate.

While the Tesla and SpaceX founder has said publicly that he lives in a modest rental in Boca Chica, Texas, a recent Wall Street Journal article begs to differ. The newspaper says Musk has been living in the luxurious lake home of billionaire friend and PayPal cofounder Ken Howery in Austin.

Located in the exclusive Watersedge community on Lake Austin, the 8,000-square-foot mansion sold for more than $12 million in 2018, the Journal reported. County records list the owner of the home as Edge Trust U/A/D, and it was valued at $12.6 million last year, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

Musk, whom the WSJ reports is worth about $240 billion, said last year that he had moved to Texas and would be selling “almost all of my physical possessions.” He later tweeted that he was staying in a home valued at less than $50,000 in Boca Chica that he had rented from SpaceX. In December, Tesla moved its headquarters to the Gigafactory it’s building in Austin, the Statesman reported.

In a text message after the WSJ story was published, Howery told the newspaper that the Tesla CEO doesn’t live in the Lake Austin home, although he’d “stayed at the house as my guest occasionally when traveling to Austin.” Howery was US ambassador to Sweden during the latter half of the Trump administration and has been traveling frequently since the end of his term, according to the WSJ story.

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The paper also reported that Musk had been looking for a home in the Austin area, sometimes accompanying real estate agents on the search.

After the publication of the WSJ story, Musk told the website Insider: “I don’t live there and am not looking to buy a house anywhere.”

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[WSJ, Austin American-Statesman] — Cindy Widner