Sign up for our daily briefing
Make your busy days simpler with Axios AM/PM. Catch up on what's new and why it matters in just 5 minutes.
Stay on top of the latest market trends
Subscribe to Axios Markets for the latest market trends and economic insights. Sign up for free.
Sports news worthy of your time
Binge on the stats and stories that drive the sports world with Axios Sports. Sign up for free.
Tech news worthy of your time
Get our smart take on technology from the Valley and D.C. with Axios Login. Sign up for free.
Get the inside stories
Get an insider's guide to the new White House with Axios Sneak Peek. Sign up for free.
Catch up on coronavirus stories and special reports, curated by Mike Allen everyday
Catch up on coronavirus stories and special reports, curated by Mike Allen everyday
Want a daily digest of the top Denver news?
Get a daily digest of the most important stories affecting your hometown with Axios Denver
Want a daily digest of the top Des Moines news?
Get a daily digest of the most important stories affecting your hometown with Axios Des Moines
Want a daily digest of the top Twin Cities news?
Get a daily digest of the most important stories affecting your hometown with Axios Twin Cities
Want a daily digest of the top Tampa Bay news?
Get a daily digest of the most important stories affecting your hometown with Axios Tampa Bay
Want a daily digest of the top Charlotte news?
Get a daily digest of the most important stories affecting your hometown with Axios Charlotte
West performs at his Sunday Service at this year's Coachella. Photo: Rich Fury/Getty Images for Coachella
Kanye West has become the latest mogul to embark on a world-saving venture, building 50-foot-high wooden domes in California for a secret housing project that the rapper "believes will break the barriers that separate classes," according to a TMZ report.
Why it matters: The uber-rich are increasingly using their wealth — Kanye is worth $240 million, per Forbes — to personally design projects that they believe will fundamentally alter the way humans will live in the future.
- Elon Musk started Neuralink, which wants to create a machine that can directly interface with the human brain, to stave off what he sees as the existential threat of artificial intelligence. And his billion-dollar Boring Company wants to solve a much more mundane nuisance with urban tunnels: traffic.
- Bill Gates has sunk $500 million of his own wealth into nuclear power startup TerraPower as part of his push against climate change, per Axios' Amy Harder.
- Jeff Bezos and Musk believe that humanity's future lies in space, pouring millions into Blue Origin and SpaceX to bring people to orbit, the Moon and beyond.
The state of play: While details on Kanye's ultimate plan for his housing concept remain sparse, he told Forbes' Zach O'Malley Greenburg earlier this month that the domes "could be used as living spaces for the homeless, perhaps sunk into the ground with light filtering in through the top."
- Greenburg also notes that the structures were "inspired by Luke Skywalker's childhood home" on the planet of Tatooine from "Star Wars."
The state of play: While Kanye might be viewed as something of a dilettante — often jumping between music, fashion and design — he's had his eye on the architecture space for over a year.
- He tweeted last May that his new architecture arm, called Yeezy Home, was "looking for architects and industrial designers who want to make the world better."
- His Yeezy Home collaborators posted concept renderings of a low-income housing space on Instagram which were later deleted, per The Architect's Newspaper, though its spartan concrete design doesn't seem to reflect the current dome concept.
- And he told radio host Charlamagne Tha God last year that he wants "to be one of the biggest real-estate developers of all time" while the two toured the Calabasas property on which the domes would ultimately be built.
"We're standing on my first property. I’m going to be one of the biggest real-estate developers of all time, what Howard Hughes was to aircrafts and what Henry Ford was to cars — just the relationships I have with architects, my understanding of space and sacred proportions, Just this new vibe, this new energy. We're gonna develop cities."— Kanye West, to Charlamagne Tha God
The other side: Experts doubt that Kanye's project could ever actually scale to make a dent in Los Angeles' housing problem. "You would need to build 100,000 of these every year for the next 10 years to scratch the housing backlog," Tyler Drew, president of Anubis Properties Inc., told Realtor.com.
- He also cited the city's zoning laws and its activist, "not-in-my-backyard" population as roadblocks to ever seriously expand Kanye's affordable housing concept.
- Such zoning restrictions, which disproportionately impact low-income residents and people of color, limit cities from getting denser and are often the primary drivers of exploding housing costs in booming cities, as Axios' Erica Pandey reported.