In 2012, Elon paid $17 million for a massive 16,251-square-foot property perched above the Bel-Air Country Club, which featured rooftop solar panels, a wine room, and the trappings of a trophy estate. He sold it in June 2020 for $29 million, a gain of roughly $12 million, or about 70% on his purchase price, through a sale to Chinese billionaire William Ding, first reported by the Wall Street Journal. The sale closed about a month after Musk had already put several California properties on the market and tweeted in early May 2020 that he intended to "own no house." Over the following eighteen months he sold off the rest of that portfolio, six properties in total, for a combined roughly $130 million.
It's the sort of windfall that sounds like a facetious joke: a guy who says he wants fewer possessions, and then has one, the biggest one he's ever had, and walks away with tens of millions more. Whatever the motive: genuine minimalism, a change of address to Texas, or simply good timing, the numbers land at an unusually forgiving moment for real estate. The home prices that U.S. adults under 35 are witnessing are 60% higher than they were in 2019, existing home sales have dropped to their lowest point in about 30 years, and the surest decline in homeownership has occurred among young adults, according to a report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies titled "The State of the Nation's Housing 2025.”
A house is a home, and it's also apparently a pastime
A house, evidently, can also be a portfolio play. Musk's Bel-Air sale wasn't a one-off; it was one piece of a larger sell-off of California real estate that eventually included six properties. The "own no house" narrative, whether for the sake of genuine minimalism or in the name of good marketing, is difficult to ignore at the level of pure numbers: buy high and sell higher, repeat. It's not investing but more of a background noise to a person whose net worth exists on another scale completely.
