Touring Elon Musk’s $50,000 Tiny Home

So Elon Musk just purchased this foldable home for fifty thousand dollars that could be assembled in under an hour, and they're taking over the world. I should have a Boxable!

Yeah, you do! Some prototype Boxables that's down in South Texas. It's an out of the box idea—building a home on an assembly line. But that's exactly what's happening at Boxable. This is our 170,000-foot factory in Las Vegas. Let me give you a tour.

This is incredible. The process begins, uh, mostly right over here, where we take the various parts and we assemble them together into the wall panels. So we have a few different layers that are laminated together. It's really precise, really accurate, and we get these better ratings on the product. The inspiration was to find a big problem. So it wasn't like we were inspired by, uh, "Oh, the light bulbs go on, and let's do this." It was much, much more clinical than that. We said, "Let's find a big problem and fix it."

So we looked around at a lot of different industries, and then this big aha moment—it's like, "Hang on a sec! Building construction is pre-industrial." And pre-industrial just means it's not made in a factory. We said, "Why? You know what? Because they're big. Like, can we fix that?"

You know, so right now, uh, the last price we sold a Boxable Casita out was sixty thousand dollars. That's for basically a 400 square foot studio apartment—kitchen, bath, bed, and couch. And if you look around in the marketplace, there's really nothing else out there at that price. I think that's one of the reasons we have such a big wait list now for the product. It's got over 160,000 names on it.

One of the big problems you see with factory-built housing—which does exist—is that it's kind of just failed to gain market share. So our initial innovation was that these houses actually fold up so they can ship highway legal at the lowest possible cost. Now that we can ship them far from a centralized factory, we can actually scale that factory and try to get on par with what you see at an automobile plant because a Ford or a Tesla plant, they're putting out one car per minute in these factories. So why can't we do one house per minute?

What was it like for Elon Musk to purchase the unit? How did that come to be?

I've got this lady who keeps calling me, and she says, "For Elon Musk's office." We had a chuckle, and, uh, as I recall it, you know, he didn't really—we didn't really think it was, uh, Musk's office. We said, "No," he said, "We can't have it. We've only got three." So then we figured out it was real. He said, "All right, you can have one because we've only got three." So we delivered it. And I think that, again, it's back to that thing where you try and do everything mostly right, and you get a break, and you get luck. So that was pretty cool, but a zillion articles got written about it, which was great.

How do you think he found you guys to begin with?

Oh, no idea. I probably, you know—pro—I did have to ask him, but he probably saw the picture of the unfolding house and just said, "Hey, that looks cool. Would you get me one?" And that was it. I don't think he really put much thought into it. Wow, but I have no idea. I'm speculating largely.

So, you can feel, you know, these panels. I mean, they're rock solid. Like, you know, a regular sheetrock wall—you know, you could maybe kick through it with your foot. Uh, you know, you're gonna break your foot before you get through this thing. It's interesting—it's pretty much styrofoam on the inside of this.

That is wild! How customizable could it be with electricity or layouts?

The idea is that we kind of have this standardized universal product. Right now, we have so much demand for just this Casita version that we're going to focus on that, keep it really simple and perfect that. But later on, we'll be able to do all kinds of customizations at the Box level, and then also you'll be able to stack and connect different boxes.

What we're doing is we're getting the bulk of the heavy lifting done for the builder developer, and then they're going to take our product. It's going to cut months and months off their cycle time, and they're going to go ahead and customize it on site.

The Boxable building technology is actually multifaceted. We have a building shell, but within the building shell, we keep taking ever finer resolution passes to get this thing into focus. So we have the technology of the building shell, but then, you know, what about the faucets? What about the furniture? What about the toilet? Literally, what about the furniture, the interior furniture and the lights and the lamps and the windows and the doors?

So we apply those same principles of innovation and critical thinking and first principles to all of that. And as the team grows—you've met some of our team today—as the team grows, you know Uncle Harold said, "You know, do the important things first." It's not my uncle Harry, by the way; somebody else, okay? Uh, do the important things first—a pretty good lesson.

So all the magic actually happens in the core, so you'll see that we've kind of got the room open here. This is where the kitchen and bathroom is going to go. All the rest of the space is just empty, and you know we don't ship empty space; we fold it up. Yeah, you can see, you know, we've got, you know, kind of the plumbing going into place, the HVAC for heating and cooling. We've got the flooring on here as well.

And how long would it take them to go from that step here to this? So right now, we're targeting about four hours for every station. Um, that time, you know, keeps coming down and down as we move forward and dial in the factory. So we're doing about one house every four hours.

Are you worried about anybody copying your designs or being able to replicate it?

So normally, if I'm critiquing somebody else and they said, "You have no competition," I'd say, "Come on, that's bull—that's hubris!" But today, people don't even know, don't even understand what we're doing.

So this is pretty much the final station, where they're doing quality control, a little bit of cleanup, and then they're going to fold the unit up, shrink wrap it, and send it out the door.

How many times could this be folded and then unfolded and folded and unfolded? Have you done a test?

Quite a lot—probably more than anyone would want to. Uh, we've had a few units that have been kind of demo units that have gotten unfolded countless times. But the idea is that these are kind of permanent buildings that are, you know, superior to other traditional permanent buildings, but just by their nature, they are totally relocatable. And I'm sure a lot of different people with different use cases will be, you know, deploying them here, taking them back, deploying them there—eight and a half feet.

That is the magic number to ship at the lowest possible cost. Pretty much any other company out there that's shipping a wide load—that's not really scalable because you just incur so much shipping costs that you kind of lose all the advantages you had from building the factory in the first place.

Welcome to the Boxable Casita! I love this.

So if we look at the Casita design, the first things you'll notice is the tall ceilings—so nine and a half foot ceilings. Ridiculously tall! One of the best ways to create a sense of volume is the ceiling height, and we pushed and pushed and pushed. You think a lot of other homes have eight-foot ceilings and even lower than that, so nine and a half is spectacularly tall. And that future-proofs us to create a lot of different combinations.

So going down the road, you want the home to feel big, so it feels like it's sort of enveloping you, and GAP is a comfortable, solid place. So it's very, very important.

With the kitchen, what we wanted to do was, with all of the appliances and everything—no half-size appliances—nothing, nothing undersized at all, appliance-wise. So you see we have this generous Z-wave counter. Twin sinks are over a giant window, which is really nice to do the dishes. You can look out for sure the window—and just a lot of cabinet space everywhere because storage is at a premium, you know, when you're around 400 square feet.

And then if we move to, you know, the back—the back of the house, the back quadrant—you know we have, you'll notice, a full-size queen bed. Nothing is small; it's a full-size queen bed. Our own organizer closets here which divide the space, which is really nice. These actually light up in production, and cute, cute features like this. So if you're watching a movie and you get a little sleepy, you know you can turn it around.

Yeah, that's great!

Yeah, all of this included. Fun little thing—this is, uh, the furniture is not, which would include this, okay? But all the appliances you see—which is where the money is—it's all included.

As with all things that become super successful, you need everything, and then you need luck. And luck is nothing mystical; it's just odds. It's just like playing cards—it's odds. There's no luck in cards, right?

So you need luck as well. And when we were doing some of these videos, we did this video of it unpacking. And for us, the unpacking is simply a means to an end. We're mechanical engineers and designers; we're fixing a problem. But for the audience, it blew their minds. And I think as a visual, it caught them, and then they wanted to learn more.

A bathroom is nice. Again, if we see this eight-foot door, it's pretty remarkable space to have an eight-foot door and a pretty generous, pretty generous full-size bathroom. And I'll actually go ahead and step in here.

Uh, one of the things we found is, um, we couldn't find the shower we liked, right? So this is a full eight-foot shower, and we designed our own. You see the logo here, right? And in terms of cost reduction, you know if you go to Home Depot, you're going to find those showers around a thousand, a thousand dollars—eight hundred dollars. We engineered this; it's superior! It's taller; it's got glass. We buy this now for under four hundred dollars.

What age did you realize though that that was a calling for you?

You know, it's just weird, but the child really—yeah, it was a child that time. You know how about throw away the toys and I'd be cutting up pieces of paper with, uh, sticky tape and putting them together.

I really didn't play with toys, so I was always sort of wired that way, you know, genetically on the one hand. And on the other hand, um, you know, sort of rebel against authority. Okay? That didn't really make me a good employee.

Yeah, so between that wiring and the fact that I really didn't want to work for somebody else, uh, that just led me down the path of entrepreneurship.

If one person sits down, they're out of view of the other person, so one could watch TV maybe with headphones on. But the rest of the time, even if we're sitting down here, I've got sight lines to the other, to the other side of the unit, and that creates the sense of space.

So, uh, I got a question for you—can I have one?