Why Elon Musk is Selling His Possessions | Joe Rogan

Now you're in the middle of this strange time where you're selling your houses, you say you don't want any material possessions, and I've been seeing all that and I've been really excited to talk to you about this. Yeah. Because it's an interesting thing to come from a guy like yourself. Like, why are you doing that? I'm slightly sad about it actually, but... Well, if you're sad about it, why are you doing it? I think possessions kind of weigh you down. They're kind of an attack vector. You know, people say, hey, billionaire, you got all this stuff. Like, well, now I don't have stuff. Now what are you going to do? Attack vector meaning like people target it. Yeah. Interesting, yeah. But you're obviously going to... So you're going to rent a place? Yeah. Okay. And get rid of everything except clothes? No, I said like almost everything. So it's like... Keep a couple Teslas. Yeah, sure. You kind of have to. Yeah. Test product and stuff. Yeah, those things that have sentimental value for sure are keeping those here. Yeah. So do you feel like... What's worse that could happen? I mean, be fine. Yeah, you could always buy more stuff if you don't like it. I suppose so. Yeah, I mean, from the money that you sell all your stuff, you could buy new stuff. But do you feel like people define you by the fact that you're wealthy and that they define you in a pejorative way? For sure. I mean, not everyone. Right. But for sure, in recent years, billionaire has become a pejorative. Like, it's a pejorative. Yeah. So it's like that's a bad thing, which I mean, I think doesn't make a lot of sense in most cases if you've done... If you basically organized a company, like, how does this wealth arise? If you organize people in a better way to produce products and services that are better than what existed before, and you have some ownership in that company, then that essentially gives you the right to allocate more capital. There's a conflation of consumption and capital allocation. So let me say Warren Buffett, for example, and to be totally frank, I'm not his biggest fan, but he does a lot of capital allocation. And he reads a lot of sort of annual reports of companies and will be counting, and it's pretty boring, really. And he's trying to figure out, does Coke or Pepsi deserve more capital? I mean, that's kind of a boring job, if you ask me. But it's still a thing that's important to figure out, like, is a company deserving of more or less capital? Should that company grow or expand? Is it making products and services that are better than others or worse? And if a company is making compelling products and services, it should get more capital, and if it's not, it should get less. We'll go out of business. Well, there's a big difference, too, between someone who's making an incredible amount of money designing and engineering fantastic products versus someone who's making an incredible amount of money by investing in companies or moving money around the stock market or doing things along those lines. It's a different thing. And to put them all in the same category seems very simple. And as you pointed out, it's an attack vector. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think it's really—I do think there—in the United States, especially, there's an over-allocation of talent in finance and law. Basically, too many smart people go into finance and law. So, you know, this is both a compliment and a criticism. We should have, I think, fewer people doing law and fewer people doing finance and more people making stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that would certainly be better for all involved if they made better stuff. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, manufacturing used to be highly valued in the United States. And these days, it's not—it's often looked down upon, which I think is wrong. Yeah. Well, I think that people are kind of learning that, particularly because of this whole pandemic and this relationship that we have with China, that there's a lot of value into making things and to making things here. Yes, somebody's got to do the real work. Yeah. You know, and, you know, like making a car, it's an honest day's living, that's for sure, you know, or making anything really, or providing a valuable service, like providing, you know, good entertainment, good information. These are all valuable things to do. You know, so, yeah, there should be more of it. Did you have a moment where—is this something that—this idea of getting rid of your material possessions, is this something that built up over time? Or did you have a moment of realization where you realized that— Yeah, I've been thinking about it for a while. You know, part of it is, like, I have a bunch of houses, but I don't spend a lot of time in most of them, and that doesn't seem like a good use of assets. Like, somebody could probably be enjoying those houses and get better use of them than me, so— Don't you have Gene Wilder's house? I do. That's amazing. It's awesome. Wow. Yes, exactly what you'd expect. Did you request that the buyer not fuck it up? Yeah, that's a requirement. Oh, a requirement. That's a good requirement. Yeah. In that case, in that house. Yeah, it'll probably self-less, but still I don't care. Oh, he's a legend. He'd want his soul. He'd want his essence in the building. Yeah, and it's there. That's a real quirky house, yeah. What makes you say it's there? Like, what do you get out of it? I mean, all the cabinets are like handmade, and they're like odd shapes, and there's like doors to nowhere and strange like car doors and tunnels and odd paintings on the wall. And yeah. Did you ever live in it? It's very quirky. I did live in it briefly, yeah. But why do you buy houses? Like, if you own all these houses, do you just get bored and go, I think I'd like to have that? Well, I had one house, and then the Gene Wilder house right across the road from me, from my main house, and it was going to get sold and then torn down and turned into, you know, be a big construction zone for three years. And I was like, well, I think I'll buy it and preserve this bird of Gene Wilder and not have a giant construction zone. And then, you know, I started having like some privacy issues where like people would, like, let people just like come to my house and, you know, start climbing over the walls and stuff. I'm like, man. So then I started like, bought a house, some of the houses around my house, and then I thought at one point, well, you know, it'd be cool to build a house. So then I acquired some properties at the top of Samara Road, which has got a great view. And it's like, okay, well, these bunch of sort of small older houses, they're going to get torn down anyway. I was like, well, you know, if I collect these like little houses, then I can build something, you know, I don't know, artistic, like a, you know, dream house type of thing. What's a dream house for Elon Musk? Like some Tony Stark type shit? Definitely. Yeah, you got to have the dome that opens up with the stealth helicopter and that kind of thing, you know. Yeah. For sure. Fuck yeah. Yeah, but then I was like, man, does it really make sense for me to spend time designing and building a house and I'd be real, you know, get like OCD on the little details and the design, or should I be allocating that time to getting us to Mars? I should probably do the latter. So, you know, like what's more important, Mars or a house? I like Mars. Okay.