Did Elon Musk buy a crumbling shelter in Los Angeles where he had volunteered as a teenager in order to rebuild it as Hope Haven, a sanctuary for homeless families? No, that's not true: Elon Musk never volunteered at a shelter in California as a teen because he was not in the USA as a teen. The deluxe private homes pictured in the article are real, but are in New Hampshire and New York, not in California. There are many organizations around the country named Hope Haven, but none have public statements announcing close ties with Elon Musk.
The fake story appeared in a post (archived here) published on Facebook on Sept. 2, 2025 by The Daily Scope. The caption of the Facebook post reads:
BREAKING: ELON MUSK JUST SHOCKED THE WORLD -- AND IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH TESLA, SPACEX, OR AI!Instead of another rocket launch or billion-dollar merger, Musk quietly bought back the crumbling Los Angeles shelter where he once volunteered as a teenager... and then DROPPED a $5 MILLION PLAN to rebuild it into "HOPE HAVEN" -- a futuristic sanctuary for homeless families, powered entirely by solar energy and AI-driven care. From tech titan to human lifeline, Musk declared: "I don't need another mansion. I'll build futures for those who've lost theirs." Fans are calling it his most radical mission yet -- but what secret drives this shocking move?...
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This is what the picture looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Image Source: Lead Stories screenshot of The Daily Scope post on Facebook)
The first comment under the post contains a link to an article (archived here) on a website hotnews.otoarizasi.com. This article includes the same photo montage with a brick mansion (pictured above) but also includes a photo of a different white house (pictured below). The article says:
Standing before the broken shelter just days after the deal closed, Musk announced a $5 million plan to rebuild it -- not as a tech campus, not as a Tesla showroom, but as "Hope Haven," a fully solar-powered recovery center for women and children battling homelessness and addiction.
(Image Source: Lead Stories screenshot from hotnews.otoarizasi.com article)
These two mansions are private residences -- they were never crumbling homeless shelters in Los Angeles. A reverse image search with Google Lens found the homes in luxury real estate features. The brick home is located in West Chesterfield, New Hampshire, and was constructed in 1991. The home is featured as "sold" in a 2021 listing (archived here) on Platinum Luxury Auctions. The photo of the white home appears in a March 29, 2018 "Home of the Day" feature in the Wall Street Journal (archived here). The home sits on Long Island Sound in Rye, New York.
A Jan. 3, 2020 article (archived here) in cnbc.com summarizes the variety of odd jobs Elon Musk had which are listed in his biography "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future"-- volunteering at a homeless shelter is not one of them. The suggestion that he did this volunteering as a teen is also ruled out by the timeline of Musk's life. During his teenage years he was in South Africa and then he moved to Canada at 17. Musk was born in 1971, so he ceased being a teenager in 1991. He did not come to the United States until 1992 when he transferred from Queen's University in Ontario to the University of Pennsylvania.
A Google search for "Hope Haven" brings up many results for organizations and facilities all over the country, some even in Los Angeles. Refining the search further, ("Hope Haven" AND "Elon Musk") does not produce any relevant results. The results show similar clickbait posts (archived here), or websites which simply happen to have the two terms on the same page, but not together in the same article.
