Elon Musk’s plans to construct a dramatic house made of glass outside Austin has drawn scrutiny from Tesla’s board members.
The clandestine operation was tagged “Project 42” by Tesla’s CEO, although it was internally billed as his residence, according to The Wall Street Journal,
While those close to the project reported to the WSJ that plans for the project have changed several times since work began on it last year, some renderings have depicted it as an unconventional structure shaped like a twisted hexagon, while others have it resembling a glass box.
Either way, Tesla board members began to scrutinize the project when a bill appeared for millions of dollars in specialized glass to form the building facades, the WSJ reported.
Due to growing concern about what the materials would be used for, an internal probe focusing on any potential misuse of company resources was launched, the WSJ reported.
The outcomes of the probe and of the order for glass that sparked it are unknown. It is generally considered rare for a board to allow corporate funds to be used for building personal homes.
As previously reported in The Dallas Express, Musk was pushed to resign as board chairman in 2018 to settle fraud charges after tweeting that he was taking the company private.
Yet he reportedly remains very close to the current board chair Robyn Denholm and other members, who did not respond to the WSJ’s request for comment.
Musk does not appear to have a fixed residence. He is often traveling between his companies in California and in Texas, the capital of which he made Tesla’s headquarters in 2021, as reported in The Dallas Express.
That same year, Musk said he was renting a modest South Texas cottage from his company SpaceX, the WSJ reported.
Yet he has also recently spoken of sleeping at Tesla’s Fremont factory and Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, according to the WSJ.
The status of Project 42 remains unknown, but limited liability companies linked to Musk’s ventures have been actively buying land around Austin over the past three years, as previously reported in The Dallas Express. The total acreage may lie somewhere between 3,500 and 6,000.
There have been claims that Musk planned to build a town for Tesla employees as well as a private compound — a “Texas utopia” along the Colorado River, as previously reported by the WSJ.
One of the concepts of the glass house reportedly envisioned by Musk was depicted on a waterfront with Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas in the background.