Away from the headlines about his eye-watering wealth, DOGE cuts, and dreams of colonizing Mars, Elon Musk's footprint across the US and the wider world has been steadily expanding. We use maps and satellite imagery to track the exponential growth of the Elon empire from his Starbase close to the Mexican border to his vast new Starlink and Boring Company development in Texas.
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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.