Elon Musk and his 37-square-meter 'tiny house': when the super-rich boast of modest life

With a fortune valued at 166,000 million euros, Elon Musk, the second richest person on the planet, has confirmed that he has been renting for a few weeks in a prefabricated and transportable house of about 37 square meters that costs about 44,000 euros. “My first residence is a $ 50,000 house that I rent in Boca Chica from SpaceX. It's amazing, ”the Tesla founder tweeted in early June. The announcement of his new and modest home came from the criticism that his wealth levels aroused after the report of the non-profit journalists' network ProPublica was made public, where it was denounced that Musk, Jeff Bezos and other US billionaires only They have declared and paid 1% of their increased wealth to the US public coffers. According to the report,Musk didn't even pay taxes on his income in 2018.

The news did not catch his followers unexpectedly.

Musk had been warning since May 2020 his intention to get rid of all his mansions to "not be a homeowner."

Since then, the founder of Tesla has confirmed to have sold up to six of his seven mansions, valued at more than 100 million dollars and located mostly in Bel Air (Los Angeles) to move his base of operations to the headquarters in Texas of SpaceX, the aerospace company he founded in 2002 and with which he intends to found his own colony on Mars (he calls himself emperor of the planet) to send and settle a million people there in 2050.

This is one of the 'houses' of Boxabl, the company that offers portable prefabricated houses and that has installed the new residence of Elon Musk.DR

Musk's new “little house” –with that diminutive in Spanish the American company that manufactures them advertises their

homes–

is rented from the

Boxabl, a company that sells portable prefabricated houses that are assembled in a single day.

Although they have only built three homes to date, as reported by

, the 'Musk effect' has led the company to have a waiting list of 47,000 people willing to take over one of their homes.

The myth of the 'frugal' millionaire

Musk is not the first super-rich to claim to live modestly. Since the past decade, an informative stream has become popular that mythologizes the idea of ​​'frugal' millionaires (or good millionaires). They are fables about the super-rich who, despite the overwhelming value of their fortunes, deny frivolity and live, in one way or another or through a symbolic object (see the Casio of less than 50 euros that Bill Gates popularized), in an austere way like the rest of the mortals. Like that Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway whose net worth is around 88,000 million euros, continues to live in a house he bought in 1958 for only $ 31,500. That Facebook CEO Mark ZuckerbergAlways wear unbranded sweatshirts and have driven a Volkswagen GTI for years or Jeff Bezos did the same with a Honda Accord years after he became a millionaire.

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"Praising rich people for their frugality is also a way to watch ordinary people for spending money on anything other than basic necessities," they wrote in the US media

on the media frenzy for making them an example for the rest: “The subtext is clear: if Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg are happy with modest houses and cheap cars, everyone else should be too.

For the rich, frugality is framed as an admirable sign of self-control;

for everyone else, it is a requirement ”, they denounced.

A stance also joined by columnist Arwa Mahdawi in

, where she wrote about the Tesla CEO's “house” that it is “little more than nauseating to see a billionaire whose wealth skyrocketed during a pandemic being revered by live modestly ”. Mahdawi recalled that Musk probably "will not entertain his six children in that house" in Texas and that although now the super-rich is not technically a homeowner, "his company is in the village of Boca Chica where that house is". to finish by stating that "if Musk really wants to help the planet, maybe he should think less about how he lives and more about paying his taxes."