Elon Musk, aka the world’s richest man, has sensationally said that he is “homeless” and actually sleeps on several friends’ couches or spare beds when he leaves Texas and finds himself in San Francisco’s Bay Area, near Tesla HQ. The confession which took the world by surprise came during an interview with TED, which aired on Monday, April 18th.
“I don’t even own a place right now, I’m literally staying at friends’ places,” the 50-year-old Tesla and Space X founder, who according to Bloomberg has an estimated net worth of $251bn, said in the interview. “If I travel to the Bay Area, which is where most of Tesla’s engineering is, I basically rotate through friends’ spare bedrooms.”
Musk seemingly defended his multi-billion-dollar wealth, including what he does with it, throughout the interview, after TED’s Chris Anderson asked him to comment on the people who were "hugely offended" by billionaires. He also confessed that he doesn’t own a yacht (as so many wealthy people appear to do) nor does he take vacations; luxurious or otherwise. "I don’t have a yacht, I don’t take vacations, so it’s not as though my personal consumption is high," Musk continued. "One exception is a plane but if I don’t use the plane I have less hours to work," he added. "For sure it would be problematic if I was consuming billions of dollars a year in personal consumption but that is not the case."
Musk's comments come just a few weeks after his 34-year-old on/off partner Grimes came under fire for an interview she gave Vanity Fair, as she claimed that he sometimes "lived below the poverty line," to help fund some of his "dangerous" and "expensive" projects that generate "no income" but are "for the benefit of humanity." The Canadian musician and record producer told the pub: "Bro does not live like a billionaire. Bro lives at times below the poverty line. To the point where I was like, 'Can we not live in a very insecure $40,000 house? Where the neighbors, like, film us, and there’s no security, and I’m eating peanut butter for eight days in a row?'" Was the billionaire's latest interview his way of doing damage control following Grimes' controversial words, or has he made matters worse?
