Elon Musk is officially no longer a Los Angeles homeowner. The Tesla and SpaceX tycoon began 2020 with six Bel Air houses to his name, but in June he sold the largest of them for $29 million to Chinese billionaire William Ding. In October, he sold a second property, the former Gene Wilder house, to Wilder’s nephew. And now he has seriously made good on his promise to “own no house” — records show the four remaining Musk properties have sold in a nearly $62 million single deal. The buyer is prominent local developer Ardie Tavangarian, who first announced the purchase to Bloomberg way back in July, though the sale didn’t close until just last week.
Musk originally put the four houses up for sale in May as a package estate tagged with a $62.5 million asking price, but the unusual thing about the estate is that it’s not really an “estate” at all — only two of the homes are contiguous, and all four structures have wildly divergent architectural styles. One of them is an ultra-contemporary mansion; next door is an elegant neoclassical Colonial house. Across the street lies a modest traditional bungalow, while the house on the hillside below was originally built in 1954 as a humble midcentury modernist ranch, but has since been majorly redone into a sprawling mansion that’s perhaps best described as ’90s modern, with a midcentury twist.
Musk acquired the properties in four separate transactions from four different sellers between summer 2015 and early 2019, paying a total of $55 million. He also spent significant sums — probably well into the millions — in construction costs to finish the largest home, so it seems unlikely he walked with any significant profit.
Of course, Musk doesn’t yet “own no home” — he’s still got a 47-acre estate in the affluent Silicon Valley town of Hillsborough, Calif., that he bought in 2017 for $23.4 million. And his musician girlfriend Grimes, the mother of his youngest son X Æ A-12, still owns a snazzily redone house in the L.A. suburb of Pasadena.
So where will the L.A.-based Musk live now that he no longer has a house in the city? The 49-year-old father of six has reportedly been scoping out lavish mansions for rent in some of the area’s poshest zip codes. One of the estate he toured is a hilltop Pacific Palisades mansion that was recently listed for lease at an eye-popping $350,000 per month. Perhaps coincidentally, that property is owned by Ardie Tavangarian.