Those were two of at least eight tweets Musk sent over two days denying a Wall Street Journal report that federal prosecutors and agencies are investigating the potential misappropriation of Tesla money to build an elaborate personal residence for its CEO. The newspaper previously reported in July, citing anonymous sources, that Tesla had launched an internal inquiry into a secretive “Project 42,” which called for a “dramatic glass-walled building” near the company’s headquarters that had been “described internally” as a house for Musk.
At issue, ostensibly, is whether Tesla and Musk stepped afoul of federal regulations requiring disclosure of perks to executives. But it’s also the latest twist in a long-running saga of public fascination with where the tech baron rests his head — a fascination that Musk has frequently stoked over the years.
Ever since the 1990s, when he reportedly slept on the floor of the Palo Alto, Calif., office of his first start-up, Musk has cultivated a hero myth. By his telling, Musk is a man so consumed by mission — whether building a website for business listings, weaning the world off fossil fuels, making civilization interplanetary or whatever he’s doing at the company formerly known as Twitter — that he has no time for basic human needs like sleep or shelter.
He often uses that image of heroic sacrifice, along with his frequent promises of world-changing products just around the corner, to justify driving his employees to put their work ahead of their own needs as he imposes wildly ambitious deadlines. And he draws on it as a defense when the chips are down.
In 2016, with Tesla under pressure for its botched launch of the Model X SUV and its acquisition of Musk’s cousin’s solar-panel company, Musk told Bloomberg News that he was sleeping in a sleeping bag at the company’s Fremont, Calif., factory. And he announced the launch of the Model 3, a car that he said would bring electric vehicles to the masses at a price of $35,000.
Two years later, with Tesla far behind on its Model 3 production goals, Musk went on “CBS This Morning” to explain that he had once again been sleeping on the factory floor, with no time even to go home and shower. He told Bloomberg Businessweek later that year that he wore the same clothes for five days while camping out on a couch or under a desk.
“The reason I slept on the floor was not because I couldn’t go across the road and be at a hotel,” Musk said at the time. “It was because I wanted my circumstances to be worse than anyone else at the company. Whenever they felt pain, I wanted mine to be worse.”
When he caught flak for snapping at investors on a Tesla earnings call that year, he blamed lack of sleep. But when media magnate and self-styled sleep guru Arianna Huffington publicly called on him to sleep more, he dismissed the idea in a 2:30 a.m. tweet. “Ford & Tesla are the only 2 American car companies to avoid bankruptcy,” he wrote. “I just got home from the factory. You think this is an option. It is not.”
After Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and promptly threw the company into chaos by laying off much of the staff and alienating advertisers, he made it known that he was sleeping on the floor of its San Francisco headquarters as he worked to instill a “hardcore” culture at the company. Soon, reports emerged that he had also set up cots for employees at the office, prompting an investigation by San Francisco building inspectors.
At least one Twitter manager, perhaps seeking to curry favor with the boss, retweeted an image of her own office sleeping bag. She added, “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork.”
Clearly, this is not a man who believes in work-life balance.
Periodically, reports emerge suggesting that Musk’s lifestyle is not as spartan as he would have the public — and his workers — believe. Each time, he goes out of his way to rebut them.
In 2019, the year after Musk made so many headlines for sleeping on the factory floor, the Wall Street Journal catalogued his growing real estate portfolio, including a “cluster of six houses on two streets” in Los Angeles’s ritzy Bel-Air neighborhood and a “grand, 100-year-old estate in Northern California.” He had even apparently built a private school building just for his kids. The story made Musk sound like a typical tycoon living in the lap of luxury.
Musk couldn’t have that. In May 2020, he tweeted that he was “selling almost all physical possessions” and would “own no house.” On the house front, at least, he seems to have mostly followed through, even selling the late actor Gene Wilder’s house back to Wilder’s family.
By 2021, he was replying proudly to a tweet about how modestly he lives, saying: “My primary home is literally a ~$50k house in Boca Chica / Starbase that I rent from SpaceX. It’s kinda awesome though.”
The move paid off in publicity. In December 2021, Time magazine’s article naming Musk its Person of the Year opened with the line: “The richest man in the world does not own a house.”
Later that month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk had actually been living mostly in a billionaire friend’s Austin mansion. Both Musk and the friend immediately denied that he had been living there, though the friend did acknowledge that Musk “occasionally” stayed there “as my guest.”
There’s no doubt that Musk is a veteran couch-surfer. Ashlee Vance’s 2015 biography described how his assistant would arrange his travel plans by cryptically emailing friends of his, “room for one?” But when that didn’t work, he stayed in fancy hotels, like the Rosewood Sand Hill near Palo Alto.
All of which might help to explain why Musk has been so eager to dispel the idea that Tesla was building him an ostentatious glass house in Austin. For Musk, being investigated over potential violations of bureaucratic rules is nothing new and rarely slows him down. But being accused of wanting to live in a nice house of his own, like any other ordinary rich guy?
