00:01Back in 2020 Elon Musk announced he was selling all his mansions worth over a hundred million dollars
00:08saying he wanted to lead a more minimalist lifestyle
00:12and that he would live in a fifty thousand dollar home instead.
00:17But when we look at satellite imagery it's clear that while he may have fewer homes
00:23Musk's empire has done nothing but expand.
00:26Take a look at how his space and tunnel boring facilities in Texas have grown in just the last two years
00:36or how a SpaceX company town is emerging close to the Mexican border.
00:42New York, California, Texas, Nevada, Shanghai, Berlin. His companies span the globe.
00:50And Musk's companies could win big from his new government department Doge.
00:54And its decimation of government agencies.
00:59We tracked his companies homes and jets to map out the full scale of the Elon Empire.
01:06You could say this is where it all started.
01:12A small office on Sherman Avenue in Palo Alto, California.
01:16It's here that Elon Musk and his brother set up Zip2, a local business directory and mapping company.
01:26You imagine the possibilities.
01:28His next move was to launch X.com as an online banking platform.
01:32Exactly. X.com.
01:34Moving to an address just a few blocks away.
01:36In 2001, X.com rebranded as PayPal and when eBay bought the platform, Musk went from rich to super rich, making $165 million from the sale.
01:50This was the moment when Musk made the move into two companies that would shake up their respective industries.
01:58Some of that investment went into creating SpaceX in the early 2000s and also investing in Tesla.
02:04This building in El Segundo, California was the first headquarters of SpaceX.
02:11Not far from where today the space exploration company has one of its main rocket manufacturing facilities.
02:17In fact, X marks the spot.
02:21Zoom out and we can see that SpaceX now operates out of six locations across the country.
02:27But in the early days launching rockets from a US base in the Pacific, Musk's mission to create reusable rockets came close to failure.
02:40SpaceX actually had three failed launch attempts.
02:44Elon Musk has said the company almost went out of business.
02:47They were some of the darkest periods of his life.
02:50But then on the fourth attempt, they were successful.
02:53And we're flying.
02:54It allowed a lot of other investors to come in and since they've become one of the most valuable private companies in the world.
03:06Once the rockets are built in California, they come here to Texas for testing.
03:13This site hasn't changed much since it was developed to manufacture bombs during the Second World War.
03:19For rocket launches, there's the Vandenberg Space Force Base on the west coast, as well as the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral in Florida.
03:30This is the main launch site for the Falcon 9 rocket, which can deliver satellites into orbit and astronauts to the International Space Station.
03:38But the new headquarters of SpaceX, and of Elon Musk's dream to one day colonize Mars, is undoubtedly his starbase at Boca Chica, Texas.
03:52As we can see from satellite pictures in recent years, it has transformed from a sleepy community with a handful of homes into a vast complex where SpaceX's starship spacecraft and super heavy rockets are built and launched.
04:08Business Insider visited Boca Chica in 2019 and spoke to residents who were under pressure to sell their homes and move out to make way for SpaceX's expansion.
04:19We don't know if they're going to let us live out our last days here, and that's scary.
04:26SpaceX has been slowly buying property in the area for years.
04:30But the company's mass-mailed offer gave residents only two weeks to decide whether they take the money and leave, or stay and deal with an experimental spaceship in their backyards.
04:39Maria Poynter did eventually move out of town, which has grown significantly since we last visited.
04:50In October 2024, a super heavy rocket booster performed the first ever launch and return catch manoeuvre.
04:57Musk now wants Boca Chica to be incorporated as a city and officially renamed Starbase.
05:10Like he has done with much of his business empire, Elon Musk has also relocated his homes from California to Texas.
05:19Up until 2021, Musk appeared to have a relatively lavish lifestyle.
05:24He had several mansions in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, including this cluster of luxury homes on Challon Road and Samara Road outside LA.
05:35Then Musk made the surprise announcement that he was getting rid of most of his belongings, including his homes.
05:42Over the next few years, that's exactly what he did. His California homes together sold for around $130 million.
05:49But he still owns property at the modest end of the housing scale this time.
05:55He has a house in Boca Chica, which he says he bought for just $50,000.
06:00He's also reported to own a boxable prefabricated house in the village, similar to this.
06:06He did buy a house in the Austin area in February 2022.
06:12In 2024, the New York Times reported he owned two more properties there, hoping to bring the mothers of his children to live close by.
06:20And here, on a bend in the Colorado River, is further evidence that Elon Musk is laying down roots in Texas.
06:31Over a couple of years, this featureless farmland has been transformed into a base for more of Musk's companies.
06:38SpaceX's Starlink and the Boring Company, which creates underground vehicle tunnels.
06:43A close look at the satellite imagery suggests he's actually using his boring machines to tunnel under the road.
06:54And according to court documents, this is the location of the new headquarters of X, formerly known as Twitter,
07:01after Musk relocated the company from San Francisco in 2024.
07:04Not far away is this building, the Ad Astra Private School, built with money from Musk's foundation.
07:15Musk has often called for educational reform and also created a school with the same name for his own kids,
07:23down near the SpaceX base in Boca Chica.
07:26Meanwhile, Musk's doge office is slashing the Department of Education's federal budget.
07:30But his ambitions here go far beyond education.
07:35There are plans to build more than a hundred homes on this plot of land as part of a so-called Project Amazing.
07:41The community is to be called Snail Brook, a nod to the mascot of his boring company.
07:48Elon Musk famously came up with the idea for the Boring Company when he was stuck in L.A. traffic.
07:52For now, the Boring Company just has its one main line at the Las Vegas Convention Center, a test tunnel in California,
08:00and one at the Tesla factory in Texas.
08:03But there are plans for more, including one in Dubai.
08:08The company has not yet delivered Musk's dream of a levitating hyperloop.
08:14Currently, it can only drive passengers between two points.
08:17Of course, we haven't forgotten about Tesla.
08:23We have to make a lot of cars.
08:24We have to make a lot of stationary packs to transition the world to sustainable technology as quickly as possible.
08:30Tesla, I would say, is the most valuable car company in the world, in part just because of how futuristic their technology is.
08:36They have their hands in a lot of pots.
08:37It's not just an automotive company, it's a tech company.
08:40Musk became CEO of Tesla in 2008, the same year the company released its first electric vehicle, the Roadster.
08:47The model was assembled here in Menlo Park, California, using a Lotus chassis from the UK.
08:54And then, famously with the Model 3, they went through production hell, trying to scale up production to thousands of units.
09:00But you didn't expect this kind of production hell, or did you?
09:03No, it's worse than I thought.
09:05We put too much new technology into the Model 3 all at once.
09:08So yeah, Tesla almost went out of business several times, most notably with the Model 3 production ramp in 2017.
09:16Today, the Model 3 is built here at the massive Fremont facility.
09:21But like the rest of Musk's businesses, the headquarters of Tesla has moved to Texas.
09:28This complex just outside Austin is where they make the Cybertruck and the Model Y.
09:33It already boasts 10 million square feet of factory floor space, and there are plans in the works to expand even further.
09:44Tesla's global footprint is growing too.
09:47This Gigafactory in China produces more cars than any other Tesla factory, and also exports to Southeast Asia and Europe.
09:54Musk's expansion plans for Tesla haven't come without their problems.
10:00This is footage of protesters in a German forest fighting the expansion of the Berlin Gigafactory.
10:06And March 2025 saw the start of a backlash against Musk and Tesla as his moves to slash costs in the federal government started to bite.
10:18Meanwhile, Musk's plans for a new Tesla facility in Mexico look to be stalled as a trade war heats up between the US and its neighbour to the south.
10:29Musk has also expressed an interest in taking Tesla to India, one of the world's fastest growing EV markets.
10:39It's no wonder that as his physical footprint expands, his carbon footprint is doing the same.
10:45In 2024, Musk's two private jets made 363 flights, emitting over 4,000 metric tonnes of CO2.
10:56This is a map we put together showing every one of his journeys.
11:00So he flies a lot from Austin to San Francisco or from California to Brownsville, Texas, where SpaceX is located.
11:11A lot of his flights, I'd say more than half, have been politically related.
11:15So he's been in and out of the Palm Beach area.
11:18He went to DC for a number of trips.
11:20And ahead of the election, he was going back and forth between swing states, particularly Pennsylvania.
11:25Musk became the richest person in the world in 2021.
11:34Since then, he famously bought Twitter and is now throwing money at other projects like Neuralink and XAI.
11:42XAI has a really interesting facility in Memphis.
11:45They scaled it up in a matter of months and it has 200,000 GPUs.
11:50It's the biggest data centre basically in the world.
11:53Musk's ambition doesn't end with his venturing into politics.
11:58Far from it.
12:00There are concerns that lucrative federal contracts for the likes of Starlink and SpaceX
12:05will not only further enrich Elon Musk, but pose an obvious conflict of interest.
12:11Elon Musk kind of always seems to have a card up his sleeve.
12:14He's always kind of working on a new idea.
12:15First Elon Musk wants to take SpaceX to the moon and then eventually he wants SpaceX to help colonise Mars.
12:23It seems all that's left to complete the Elon Empire is to achieve his goal of colonising space, Mars in particular.
12:29SpaceX already has over 6,700 Starlink satellites around the Earth in lower orbit.
12:40And a Tesla Roadster, launched from a SpaceX rocket in 2018, is still somewhere out there, in an irregular orbit around the Sun.
12:51But it's Mars where Musk sees his real legacy, establishing a permanent human settlement on the red planet, using his starship rocket to get there.
13:01But it's quite a lot more, as he's far from the opposite.
13:02He's trying to find his own destiny, he sees it as a new reality.
13:05We're on the left to the moon and it's all about Morgan's current.
13:07In this case, you just don't worry about him then.
13:09The way he sees it.
13:10The lên spacecraft without the name of the moon, will refuse the light of earth.
13:11He lives in this post a little bit, once he sees it, he sees it, he sees it.
13:13The way he sees it, he sees it, he sees it, he sees it, he sees it, he sees it in the future.
13:16He sees it and sees it and he sees it, he sees it.
13:18His name is it.
13:20The way he sees it and sees it from the other and he sees it.
13:22It's not his own way.
13:24The way he sees it, he sees it, he's talking about it.
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