In 2020, Elon Musk did something nice for Jordan Walker-Pearlman, the nephew of Willy Wonka actor Gene Wilder. He lent him the money to buy his childhood home. Four years later, Walker-Pearlman can’t keep up with the payments and Musk is kicking him out.
Beloved actor Gene Wilder bought the California home in 1976 for $300,000. Today, its owners have listed it for sale at $12.95 million. The people trying to sell are Walker-Pearlman and his wife Elizabeth Hunter. Walker-Pearlman grew up in the house at the side of his famous uncle and says he has many treasured memories there.
Musk once lived across the street from the home and a trust associated with him bought it in 2013. Walker-Pearlman and Hunter wanted to buy it but they didn’t have the cash so Musk loaned them $6.75 million to buy it on the condition that they keep the soul of the house alive.
“He could have sold it for so much more. His sensitivity to me can’t be overstated,” Walker-Pearlman told the Wall Street Journal back in 2022.
Walker-Pearlman and Hunter, however, couldn’t keep up with the payments. Walker-Pearlman blamed the writer’s strike for the dip in revenue and said his wife was tired of owing Musk, both literally and figuratively. “She did not want to continue morally owing Elon anymore. We already owe him such a spiritual debt,” he told the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
Musk’s trust moved to foreclose the home, giving the couple 90 days to vacate. They’re trying to sell it before that happens. Walker-Pearlman has been sanguine in public about all this telling the Journal, “There’s no tragedy here. Elon Gave us a magical opportunity. I have no complaints.”
Four years ago, Musk announced on X (then Twitter) that he was selling “almost all” his physical possessions. “Will own no house,” he said. “Just one stipulation on sale: I own Gene Wilder’s old house. It cannot be torn down or lose any of its soul.”
Why was he selling everything? “Don’t need the cash. Devoting myself to Mars and Earth. Possession just weighs you down.”
Just one stipulation on sale: I own Gene Wilder’s old house. It cannot be torn down or lose any its soul.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 1, 2020
Though Musk has not officially occupied a home in the past four years, he does still need a place to sleep. In 2022, Grimes—the mother of three of Musk’s children—told Vanity Fair that the world’s richest man was living in a squalid $40,000 home in Los Angeles and slept on a mattress with a hole in it.
This was around the same time that Musk shared a picture of his nightstand with the world: a photo that contained four cans of caffeine-free Diet Coke, a Revolutionary War-era flintlock pistol, and a reproduction of the revolver from the video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It was, in many ways, the bedside table of an adolescent boy.
My bedside table pic.twitter.com/sIdRYJcLTK
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 28, 2022
It’s beautiful that that kind of childish mind was able to do something nice for Walker-Pearlman, who got to spend the last four years in a home where he formed many childhood memories.
“This is likely the closing of a very unicorn and beautiful chapter of our lives. I’m not disgruntled at all,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
