Elon Musk’s tough childhood is a story almost as old as his success. From owning one black suit and wearing it repeatedly. He once tried surviving on just $1 a day to cut unnecessary expenses. As a young man, he even took risky boiler-room jobs for extra cash, the kind of work few others wanted. So why, now, does the world’s richest man, worth more than $837 billion, still live like someone with no interest in money? His mother, Maye Musk, who shared in many of those early hardships, recently described her son’s living conditions, and no one in their right mind would guess they belonged to a man worth $837 billion. Not like a king, certainly, and barely like a middle-class American.
The model wrote in an X post on Tuesday about her son’s living space in Boca Chica, South Texas, near SpaceX’s Starbase launch site: “There is no food in the fridge. The garage where I slept is on the right. The shower only has one towel so I left it for Elon. That was okay with me. When I was a child, I’d spend three weeks in the Kalahari Desert without showering. Many times. There was no water. I think my parents prepared me for this luxury.” That is exactly why the revelation feels so mind-boggling. The wealthiest person on the planet does not seem to have a guest bedroom ready for family, nor even the kind of basic comforts most ordinary households take for granted. No stocked fridge, no fresh towels, no visible effort to make the place feel warm or lived in.
It says a lot about the way Elon Musk’s mind works. By simple math, one minute of his fortune is worth roughly $1.6 million. Yet the man who can theoretically make that much in sixty seconds appears to have little interest in spending time on towels, interiors, or hosting comforts. His attention is evidently reserved for his companies, carmaker Tesla, rocket giant SpaceX, and artificial intelligence startup xAI. There is neither much time nor much intention, it seems, to beautify the modest $50,000 Boca Chica house that Musk has said he rents from SpaceX.
A closer look at the home reveals a bare, open-plan room with white kitchen cabinets, a basic stainless-steel fridge and stove, a farmhouse-style sink, a plain dining table and chairs, and very little decoration beyond a simple rug. The few things that truly stand out are not family photographs or personal memorabilia, but a large rocket sculpture that feels like an unmistakable reminder of the mission that consumes him. Also visible is a Japanese-style sword, or katana, with a light-colored patterned hilt and a large ornate circular handguard. Everything else in the house looks standard, almost startlingly so, maybe even lackluster for a man of such unimaginable wealth, apart from those objects and a black motorcycle-style leather jacket draped over one of the dining chairs.
In many ways, Musk really does live like a man trying to own as little as possible. He appears to have kept his word from his May 2020 post, “I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house,” after which he moved to offload seven California properties that were together worth around $100 million at the time. Still, the contrast becomes even more intriguing because according to The New York Times, Musk had assembled a sprawling Austin-area family compound for his children and some of their mothers, though he later denied those reports.
That tension only adds another layer to the story. The public image is of a man who sleeps on factory floors, lives beside rockets, and keeps one towel in the shower. Yet the scale of his fortune means even the rumor of a compound feels entirely plausible. If such a place ever does fully materialize, perhaps Maye Musk may finally get a comfortable guest room. Until then, the mother of three seems more than prepared to rough it out.
