Elon Musk is one of the richest people on the planet with a net worth estimated to be in the region of $69 billion.

But the tech innovator who founded PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX says hes thinking about becoming homeless.

Hes put two of his mansions up for sale, tweeting in May: I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house.

He added that he would devote his life to Mars and Earth and said he didnt need any more money because possessions just weigh you down.

Now in a wide-ranging New York Times interview he said: I guess well just rent a place somewhere

I just have all these houses but nobody is using them, he said.

I use them infrequently. In the Bay Area, for example from 2002 to 2017, I never owned a house and I was there half the week so I would either sleep at the factory or in a friends spare bedroom or on a couch or in a hotel.

"I did that for 15 years.

Musk joked he could always crash with his fellow billionaires Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google.

He says he used to enjoy sofa-surfing with his Silicon Valley pals.

He told the New York Times: It was actually, in retrospect, kind of good because you end up rotating through friends houses and you catch up with them and stay in contact, whereas these days, I have been staying in this strange Gatsby-like house, what I call the haunted mansion, and its a bit bleak, to be totally frank.

The house itself is beautiful but, you know, its like Wayne Manor without Alfred.

Musks focus is increasingly on building a self-sustaining city on Mars, which he says will require 1,000 spacecraft launches a year.

He predicts that the Mars habitat, which will be protected by a huge anti-radiation dome, will have an outdoorsy, fun atmosphere."

He told the Third Row Tesla podcast that there should be a direct democracy on Mars with the inhabitants making decisions for themselves rather than being ruled from Earth.

Musk also says there ought be simpler laws on Mars than there are on Earth.

Food for his first Mars city will be grown on solar-powered hydroponic farms, but Musk says he will probably die before the colony is completely self-sustaining but, he says, Id like to at least be around to see a bunch of ships land on Mars.

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Elon Musk selling LA homes and dreams of move to 'self-sustaining' Mars colony - Daily Star