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Elon Musk is angling to join the ‘homeless billionaires’ club, a rare group of super-high net worth individuals who think that less is more, finding solace in having no homes or possessions.

The SpaceX founder is, at the time of writing, the wealthiest man in the world, and he is following in the footsteps of billionaires like Nicolas Berggruen and Warren Buffett who joined the club a while ago.

These men are supposedly more comfortable “accruing money or giving it away than living a typical billionaire’s lifestyle”, for a little while at least, reports The Telegraph.

While Musk’s tweets are a mixed bag, he really has put his money where his mouth is this time.

He is sticking true to his statement sent out on May Day last year:  “I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house.”

Since then, he has gone from owning at least six houses in California alone, with a property portfolio worth $100 million, to seriously downsizing.

He is currently living in a 400-square feet tiny Boxabl house that he says he rents from his rocket company, all while making $383 million per day on average between April 2020 and April 2021.

It looks something like this:

On his road to shedding all he has, he seems to have also become girlfriendless, having recently “semi-separated” from the musician Grimes, with whom he shares an 18-month old son, X Æ A-Xii, known as “X”.

Now it makes sense why they were at separate Met Gala afterparties.

Grimes apparently made him keep at least one home, and he has – the 16 000 square foot mansion just south of San Francisco that he still uses for events.

The other house he sold, previously the home of Gene Wilder, he never lived in. It was used as the location for his super-exclusive alternative school AdAstra, where his six children and the kids of the Tesla and SpaceX high-ups go.

The house was on the market for $37,5 million:

His reasons for joining the ‘homeless billionaires’ club are simple:

“In some ways, possessions weigh you down,” Musk said last year when asked about his status as a “homeless billionaire”. “And also, I just have all these houses but nobody is using them.”

…“I have been staying in this strange Gatsby-like house, what I call the haunted mansion, and it’s a bit bleak, to be totally frank,” he said. “The house itself is beautiful but, you know, it’s like Wayne Manor without Alfred.”

His Batman metaphor highlights the existentialism that many other billionaires supposedly feel.

Paris-born investor Berggruen has been on this “less is more” rollercoaster for far longer than Musk has.

Berggruen went from having a $250 000 trust fund to building up a $2 billion fortune after buying property and stakes in companies in the 1980s and 90s, along with all the flashy trappings, to eventually growing bored of it all in the 2000s.

He got rid of most of the things he owned back then because owning them took “energy away from other things” and because “it became less and less interesting”.

All until five years ago when he suddenly brought up the most expensive “nests” in Los Angeles after becoming a father to a few children:

First came a sprawling 1920s mansion above the Sunset Strip, then a $41 million estate once owned by Louis B Mayer’s daughter, then the estate next door and, earlier this month, $63,1million for William Randolph Hearst’s estate in Beverly Hills – thought to be the highest price ever paid for a house at auction.

Yeah, that’s the house that was in The Godfather and The Bodyguard and rumoured to be the home where John F and Jackie Kennedy honeymooned.

I guess the “lure of a property portfolio, and the ease with which you can have one” can get the best of any billionaire.

US business magnate Buffett and his friend and fellow philanthropist, Chuck Feeney, are the real makoyas for sticking it out.

Here’s why Buffett is happy to give it all up:

“How would I improve my life by having 10 houses around the globe? I don’t want to manage 10 houses and I don’t want somebody else doing it for me and I don’t know why the hell I’d be happier,” Buffett told the BBC.

And here’s Feeney’s reasoning:

Feeney, the true “homeless billionaire”, has often been asked why he did it, when so few others feel the same urge. He always has the same reply: “It was the right thing to do.”

Who knows if Musk is on the exact same page in the ‘homeless billionaires’ club handbook with plans to take civilisation to Mars, though.

[source:telegraph]