Elon Musk is comfortable with controversy.
He’s known for antagonizing liberals and sharing misinformation on X. His public appearances touch off speculation about drug use and Nazi sympathies. Now he’s caught in a clash-of-the-titans style battle with his former bestie, President Donald Trump.
But, this week, Musk is about to square off against a far different adversary: his neighbors.
Musk has been locked in conflict with the folks who live near him in West Lake Hills, the wealthy city within a city surrounded by Austin, according to an April story in The New York Times. After an LLC bought the $6 million home on Musk’s behalf a few years ago, the Times reported, a fence and a gate were built without the approval of city officials.
Musk now wants West Lake Hill’s city council to give him a pass by retroactively approving the changes to the property. Musk’s neighbors want the council to deny his request, which may mean Musk would have to come into compliance or face fines.
The city council will discuss the issue in a public meeting on Wednesday. The meeting starts at 7 p.m. City officials declined to comment on the discussion before the meeting. Musk and his representatives did not respond to emails.
This feud is happening closer to home as Musk’s fight with the president continues to unfold on the national stage. After criticizing Donald Trump’s federal spending bill — spurring the president to call for his deportation — Musk this weekend announced he would be starting a new political party to rival Republicans and Democrats.
Here in Texas, Musk has doubled down on his business and political investments. He is expanding the footprint of his companies Tesla and SpaceX in the state and recently achieved nearly all of the public goals he had pending before the Texas Legislature.
In addition to moving most of his businesses’ headquarters here, Musk has also moved himself. He has been linked to at least two properties: a small home near the SpaceX rocket launch facility in South Texas and the multi-million dollar Austin-area property in question at this week’s meeting.
Neither home is in Musk’s name.
But The Texas Newsroom was able to connect him to the West Lake Hills property through emails obtained through public records requests that show representatives from Excession, a company set up to handle Musk’s personal wealth, communicated with city officials about the property.
At a preliminary hearing about the West Lake Hills home with the city’s zoning and planning commission in April, Musk’s neighbors said he should not get special treatment by having his requests approved after the fact when other residents go through the proper channels to make changes to their homes.
“Granting these variances would do nothing but to facilitate their bad behavior on our quiet little cul-de-sac,” Paul Hemmer, who lives on the street, said as he read from a letter signed by three of the four neighbors at the April meeting.
While he did not call out Musk by name, Hemmer complained the presence of “one of the richest men in the world” is disrupting the quiet cul-de-sac. He said the property is being used as a security base for multiple other properties Musk owns in the Austin area, and remarked on the aesthetics of one of the fences Musk built.
“It is not in keeping with the neighborhood. Actually, it looks like it belongs at Fort Knox,” he said.
Likening the homeowner to a king, resident Anne Yeakel said perhaps it was not the right house for what he needs: “I mean, castles belong on the top of hills, right?”
“They think they own the world,” Hemmer added, saying Musk is known for his "ask for forgiveness not permission" mentality. “He's always guilty about building stuff and then asking for permission later.”
“That's not really something we can address here,” a commissioner responded.
Tisha Ritta, a land development specialist working for the homeowner, said her client went to great personal expense to install the necessary security precautions in a way that “doesn't affect … adjacent neighbors.”
“I don't think it has any negative impact on the property area,” she said.
The city’s zoning board unanimously denied Musk’s requests at the April meeting.
The Texas Newsroom obtained hundreds of pages of documents about the dispute already given to The Times. They include emails in which Ritta asks for future discussions about the home to be held behind closed doors. Stating the property owner was “a Federal Public Officer” and therefore should be exempt from open meetings laws, Ritta requested a private hearing. The city declined that request.
But local officials and law enforcement are attempting to deny the release of any more records about Musk’s properties.
The Texas Newsroom requested several weeks of communications between Musk’s representatives and city officials in addition to what was released to The Times. The city’s lawyer is asking the Office of the Attorney General to keep these records private, claiming that releasing them would “create a ‘substantial threat of physical harm.’”
The Travis County Sheriff’s Office, which oversees public safety in the area, also declined to release a log of calls made from the property to local law enforcement also citing this “physical safety exception” to state records laws.
The Office of the Attorney General has 45 days to make a decision on whether to release the records.
