Elon Musk Lives in a Prefab Tiny Home That He Doesn’t Even Own, a Boxabl Casita
autoevolution.com
autoevolution.com
Fake-wood plastic floors
Fake-wood MDF cabinetry, with superfluous detailing
Plastic benchtops
Horrible overhead lighting layout.
The 'LCD television-as-wall-divider' is the cherry on top of this nightmare.
The problem isn't simply that they've chosen cheap, poor-substitute materials, the whole thing has been thrown together with no sense of design or cohesion.
Good design costs almost nothing - Contrast it with this Australian modular / pre-fab: https://www.dwell.com/article/wattle-bank-tiny-shipping-cont...
It also uses inexpensive materials (Untreated plywood for the interiors, shipping containers for the structure), but it's thoughtfully designed and quite beautiful.
We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out.
The other reason is that he could be "broke", as in he has no cash. All of his wealth is in stock of Tesla, SpaceX,... and he cannot sell any of that without loosing control of the companies or pluging the stock price. I think that's also why he sold all his real estate some time ago.
He could get a loan of $10M, a tiny fraction of his wealth, in minutes. He could collateralize it easily with any of his assets, even if some aren't liquid (although we should consider Tesla stock to be very liquid at this point).
And the idea that the stock price of those companies would collapse if he sold a few million is frankly idiotic.
This is how taxes are not paid. No income, no tax. No realized capital gains, no tax.
Propublica recently went into detail on this.
I know several non-wealthy people who just did the same thing with their houses.