An underground activist group says it’s about to do to Elon Musk what Musk’s companies, and much of the tech industry, do to the rest of us: collect and publish where he lives. The group calls itself the Capytistas, and in a press release on Monday it said it plans to publish more than 150 home addresses tied to billionaires and their inner circles, starting this month with Musk, his brother Kimbal and Tesla’s board.
The plan was first reported by Wired, which interviewed two members on condition of anonymity and saw a copy of the Musk dossier. UNILAD Tech followed up yesterday. The group says it has raised more than $1.2 million to fund the work. What stands out, once you read past the rhetoric, is how ordinary most of its methods are. That’s the part worth paying attention to, whatever you think of Musk.
The short version
- The Capytistas say they spent a year building dossiers on billionaires and their top executives.
- The first release targets Musk, with 32 home addresses tied to him and his executives in the file Wired saw.
- Later releases promise 150+ addresses and 3,500+ records on people worth about $1.4 trillion combined.
- Most of the digging uses property records, court filings, LLCs and trusts. Some uses ad-tech location data.
- The group openly calls it doxxing. Tesla didn’t respond to Wired’s request for comment.
Who the Capytistas are
Not much is known for sure, which is the point. The two members Wired spoke with described an international group of activists, researchers, journalists and artists, some of whom they said had won top awards in their former media careers. Many work in “silos” and don’t know each other’s names. The name is a play on the Zapatistas, the Indigenous insurgents of southern Mexico. The mascot is a capybara, chosen in the early days of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency as a rival to the Shiba Inu dog that Musk used to brand DOGE.
The group says its $1.2 million came from “a heartening number of wealthy class traitors” who believe extreme concentrations of wealth and political power are an “existential threat.” Its motto is an adapted line from the late folk singer Utah Phillips: “Democracy is not dying, it’s being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”
What’s in the Musk file
According to Wired, the Musk dossier sorts people into tiers. Musk is the “primary target.” Tesla’s board members and top executives, including board chair Robyn Denholm and Kimbal Musk, are “secondary targets,” each with a critical biography drawn from court rulings, labor board decisions and securities filings, paired with a home address. Investors such as Vanguard and BlackRock, plus nearly 40 suppliers, are “tertiary targets,” listed only by corporate office, factory or mine.
Oddly, the members told Wired that Musk is among their “least important” targets and that his file is one of the smallest. He was picked first because no one else draws as much public anger, and the group wants to use that attention as a gateway to targets it considers more significant.
How you find a billionaire’s house
This is where the story stops being only about Musk. The Capytistas say most of their work involves digging through property records, court filings, and the LLCs and trusts wealthy people use to buy real estate. The rich rarely buy homes in their own names. They buy through a company with a bland name, or a trust managed by a lawyer, so the deed at the county recorder’s office doesn’t point straight back to them. Unwinding those shells is tedious, but it’s the same paper-trail work investigative reporters do every week.
Less often, the group says, it uses physical surveillance, “human infiltration,” and advertising intelligence. That last one deserves a closer look, because it affects everyone. Apps on your phone share location data with ad networks, and that data gets bought and resold. In theory it’s anonymous. In practice, a phone that sleeps at the same spot every night isn’t anonymous for long.
| Method | What it can reveal | Who else uses it |
|---|---|---|
| Property records | Owner name, purchase price, mailing address | Journalists, title companies, people-search sites |
| LLC and trust filings | Who’s behind a shell that owns a home | Investigative reporters, lawyers |
| Court filings | Addresses in lawsuits, divorces, permits | Researchers, background check firms |
| Ad-tech location data | Where a device spends its nights | Data brokers, marketers, some government agencies |
| Physical surveillance | Daily routines, vehicles, visitors | Private investigators |
One member’s argument to Wired is that the businesses billionaires run depend on collecting ordinary people’s personal information, often without real consent, while the owners enjoy private lives. They call it “doxmaxxing.” You don’t have to buy the politics to see the irony. If you’ve ever wondered how a stranger got your cell number, our breakdown of how political campaigns got your number walks through the same broker pipeline.
Musk has been here before
Musk’s relationship with location tracking is complicated. In December 2022, shortly after he bought Twitter, the platform suspended @ElonJet, an account run by college student Jack Sweeney that posted his private jet’s movements using public flight data. Musk said a “crazy stalker” had followed a car carrying his young son in Los Angeles, and Twitter changed its rules to ban sharing someone’s live location. Several journalists who covered the suspension were briefly locked out too.
Back in 2025, as protests against DOGE spread, an anonymous site called DOGEQuest posted what it claimed were the home addresses of Tesla owners and DOGE staff. And the risk to tech executives isn’t hypothetical. Wired notes that in April, San Francisco police arrested a 20-year-old who allegedly threw an incendiary device at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home.
Is this even legal?
It depends heavily on what’s published and how. In the U.S., republishing information from public records is generally protected speech, and newspapers report the homes of public figures all the time. But a growing number of states have anti-doxxing laws that target publishing someone’s personal information with the intent to cause harassment or harm. California, for example, now lets victims sue in some of those cases. Any campaign that pairs an address with a call to show up outside a home is walking close to that line, and the group’s hope for “protests outside homes and on golf courses” may be exactly what a judge looks at.
The Capytistas frame their work as nonviolent pressure. One member pointed to the 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and argued the group is trying to create an “off-ramp” from that kind of violence. “In the end,” they said, “we may be doing them a favor.” Critics will argue the opposite: that publishing addresses of people who already face threats makes violence more likely, not less.
How to shrink your own footprint
You can’t disappear, but you can make yourself a lot harder to find.
[ ] Search your name + city …….. see what people-search sites show
[ ] Opt out of top broker sites ….. Spokeo, Whitepages, BeenVerified, etc.
[ ] California resident? ……….. use the state’s DROP deletion portal
[ ] Phone ad ID ……………….. reset or delete it in privacy settings
[ ] App location ………………. “While Using” or “Never”, not “Always”
[ ] Precise location …………… off for apps that don’t need it
[ ] Deliveries ………………… consider a PO box for public filings
California residents have the strongest tool: the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, or DROP, created under the state’s Delete Act. One request covers every registered data broker, and brokers have been required to process those requests since August. Elsewhere, you’ll have to opt out site by site, or pay a removal service to do it for you. On your phone, both iOS and Android let you limit ad tracking and turn off precise location for individual apps. It’s not glamorous, but it cuts off the same pipelines the Capytistas say they’re using.
As for Musk, his political fights are only getting bigger. Before yesterday’s midterm results, we looked at what a Democratic Congress could do to Musk’s businesses. A dossier full of addresses is a very different kind of pressure, and the first release is due this month.
Sources and further reading
- Wired: Anti-oligarchy activists plan to dox Elon Musk and hundreds of billionaire-linked homes
- UNILAD Tech: Elon Musk’s private home address could be about to be leaked
- Daily Dot: DOGEQuest and the Tesla doxxing site
- California Privacy Protection Agency: Data broker registry and DROP
About this article: GeekBlog covers U.S. technology news, AI, phones, smartwatches and gaming. Every story is written and checked under our Editorial Policy. Spotted a mistake or have a story tip? Contact our editors.
