SpaceX and Tesla founder, Musk, whose fortune is estimated at $23.4 billion, secured household loans on five properties in California, four in the Bel Air neighbourhood in Los Angeles and one in Hillsborough, in the Bay Area. The Morgan Stanley loans, signed in the final days of 2018, represent about $50 million in new borrowing. One refinancing on a 20,200-plus square-foot property he bought in 2012 for $17 million turned a $10 million loan into a $19.5 million debt. Musk’s loans are for 30 years with a fixed 3.5 percent interest rate for the first few years that then adjusts based on an index.
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Musk has previously used his shares in Tesla to obtain personal loans. About 40 percent of his stake in the electric carmaker was pledged at the end of 2017. He doesn’t take a salary from Tesla, and he’s repeatedly gone to the market to buy the carmaker’s stock in a show of confidence in the company, which has never turned an annual profit.
Musk joined other ultra-wealthy property owners who have had to take out monster mortgages, like Mark Zuckerberg, Beyonce and Jay-Z and Ken Griffin. The latter took out massive loans in 2016, securing about $114 million in total.