The Key to Affordable Living Is Moving In With Your Sibling
It’s getting harder to rent or buy a home. So more people are living with a brother or sister.
3 min
Grant Gechtman had a dilemma.
He was preparing to meet a date at his place when he realized he hadn’t mentioned something important: He has an identical twin brother, Dylan, who lives with him.
Grant and Dylan Gechtman , 25, share a rented three-bedroom home in Fremont, Calif. They do almost everything else together too. They work as senior associate scientists at the same pharmaceutical company, share a Mazda CX-5, and even joined the same Jewish fraternity in college.
They have another roommate, college friend Vedant Vaidya —whom their co-workers sometimes call the “third twin”—but they don’t view it as a permanent situation.
“We definitely don’t want to live in a big house with both of our wives and stuff like that,” said Dylan.
More adults have moved in with their siblings in recent years, a reflection of how it is becoming harder and more expensive to buy a home or make the rent. With Americans living longer and having fewer children —and divorcing late in life —siblings can be the closest people left for support.
There are about 1.1 million adults ages 50 and older living with a sibling, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family & Marriage Research. That represents about 1.6% of that age group in 2022, up from about 1.3% in 2012.
There are also about 1.9 million adults ages 18 to 29 living with a sibling. That works out to about 3.6% of that cohort.
“Often when young adults talk about moving back in with their parents, there’s a sense of defeat,” said Krista Westrick-Payne, the center’s assistant director. “Moving in with a sibling…may feel less like a failure.”
Bowling Green’s analysis didn’t include those in their 30s or 40s.
Sherry Campbell , a certified financial planner, has noticed a small yet significant rise in clients seeking guidance on managing finances while owning a home with siblings. Most of her clients are women over 50, looking for emotional and financial support to get through a divorce.
“Men will a lot of times remarry, and women will not remarry,” Campbell said. “So that causes them to search for other ways to have that second income.”
Rooming with a brother or sister can come with challenges. Just because two people were raised the same way doesn’t mean they have the same views about cleaning, privacy or dating. And it is a lot harder to kick a roomie off the lease when you are blood relatives.
But there are perks too. The person in the other room already knows your life story; no need to explain it. And lots of sibmates said it was easier to get over a fight with a sibling than with a friend—perhaps because of the years of experience.
“Obviously you know what you’re getting into,” said Ben Karlin , who recently moved into the rented two-bedroom apartment of his triplet sister, Allison Karlin . “We kind of had a test run for 18 years.”
Ben and Allison have been living together in New York City since September. Their fridge is small, so Ben is careful about what he buys, picking up apples one trip and grapes the next. They don’t share groceries—only condiments.
“Our mom said before we moved in we have to operate like we’re not siblings,” said Ben, a 26-year-old publicist. “I feel like we make an effort.”
They enjoy having their grandparents just a few minutes away. Other family is close by as well. Their other brother, Jason, lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Boston with his girlfriend. He’s jealous of how much time Allison and Ben get to spend with the extended family.
“It’s harder sometimes to feel closer to family members when they’re not down the hall,” Jason said.
‘The modern-day Golden Girls’
The pandemic sparked a big run-up in home prices, and mortgage rates remain high even though the Federal Reserve has started cutting its benchmark interest rate. That has made the idea of buying a home with friends or family members a lot more enticing for many Americans.
Sisters Cheryl Sutton and Sandra Sutton recently bought a five-bedroom home in Portland, Ore., with their best friend. They were ready to leave California and wanted more space for their three dogs.
They knew it would work because they all have been living together for the past 25 years, leveraging each move into an upgrade. Each year, they travel somewhere new together. Next year, they’re going to Scotland. They call themselves the modern-day Golden Girls.
“At this point, anybody that gets married, they’re gonna have to just take the other two as well,” said Sandra, a 52-year-old talent coordinator for a tech company. “There’s no plans to not live together.”
Lauren Rogers , a real-estate agent in Southern California, recently sold a two-bedroom condo in Upland, Calif., for $603,000 to two brothers. The older brother, in his mid-30s, couldn’t afford to buy on his own. So his mother proposed the idea of buying with his younger brother, who is in his late 20s.
Rogers thought it was a great idea to invest together at an early age but says things might change as they get older. “I just told them, ‘This is not your forever home, but it’s your stepping point to get to the next,’” she said.
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From making unpopular decisions to learning when to listen, leaders from five businesses reveal what nobody prepared them for — and how running a company has challenged their expectations.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Elon Musk is exploring a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX, a deal that could reshape the future of AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles and space technology. With a combined valuation potentially reaching $3.5 trillion, the move could bring Musk’s vision of an interconnected technology ecosystem closer to reality, although a deal remains uncertain.
5 min
Elon Musk has engineered ties between Tesla TSLA 3.41%increase; up pointing triangle and SpaceX SPCX 7.79%increase; up pointing triangle that are hard to break, and now he wants to fuse them together permanently.
Musk has run both Tesla and SpaceX concurrently over the past two decades, using a schedule that dictated which days he spent focused on each business.
The companies have often shared resources and personnel, signaling their close ties. Last year, SpaceX looked into creating a spacesuit for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla last week showed off its new Roadster, a vehicle featuring SpaceX rocket thrusters that it hopes to soon bring to market.
And in recent months, Musk has repositioned both companies by expanding beyond their core operations toward a shared mission centered on artificial intelligence.
The world’s richest man on Tuesday signaled his interest in tying up SpaceX and Tesla, marking what would be the biggest corporate merger of all time. Because he serves as chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk said committees of independent directors at both companies are evaluating a possible deal, adding that a transaction might not come to fruition.
The committees will likely evaluate, with lawyers and bankers, how each company would fare in a potential deal and how a deal might best be structured. They then present their conclusions to their respective boards, who typically vote on whether to proceed.
“It’s an odd Kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk told SpaceX investors on Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question about a potential deal.
For Musk, the merger supports his vision of a world full of autonomous cars, humanoid robots and weekly rocket launches, as well as the data centers and satellites required to keep the whole thing running.
Some investors and analysts said they expect a transaction would be structured as an all-stock deal, with SpaceX potentially paying a modest premium for Tesla shares.
SpaceX, which has a market value of about $2 trillion, said it is seeing sharp growth in revenue across its businesses, which include operating data centers, launching rockets and operating satellite networks such as the internet service Starlink. Tesla is valued at about $1.5 trillion and is expanding its operations beyond its automotive and energy business. Shares in both companies traded higher following the news Tuesday.
Musk’s substantial ownership stakes in both companies, along with voting control at SpaceX, has enabled him to set the deal in motion. Analysts and investors said the deal will probably face regulatory scrutiny internationally, though some see Musk’s close relationship with the Trump administration as an asset to getting approval.
Blurred lines
The companies haven’t said which directors are on the special committees evaluating a potential deal. Several SpaceX and Tesla board members have either personal or business ties to Musk. And like Musk, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis sits on both boards.
In a filing this week, Tesla outlined millions of dollars in business agreements with SpaceX and its subsidiaries last year, including $143 million in car sales to SpaceX, $3.3 million in advertising that it bought on the social-media platform X and $430 million in revenue from the sale of Megapack batteries for SpaceX’s data centers.
The companies also split the cost of resources including the use of Musk’s SpaceX jet and the bill for his personal security, which he runs through a private company.
Employees at both companies routinely move between companies to work on special projects, and some executives have dual roles, including Charles Kuehmann, vice president of materials engineering at both SpaceX and Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the vice president of AI software at Tesla who runs a joint venture with SpaceX called Digital Optimus.
Over the years, Musk has launched new startups within his empire, including brain-implant company Neuralink, underground-tunnel developer the Boring Company and xAI, the AI startup that merged with SpaceX in February.
It is that AI business that Musk thinks can serve a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, justifying the need for a merger.
The business case goes like this: Tesla is developing robotaxis and robots, which it calls “physical AI.” SpaceX is working on the back end of physical AI: the data-center capacity and internet connection required for those robotaxis and robots to operate continuously.
“I don’t see what the value of Tesla is if it’s not merged with SpaceX,” said investment adviser Ross Gerber, a former Tesla bull turned critic invested in both companies. “If they don’t merge, the brains of everything that runs Tesla is owned by another company.”
On top of it all, both companies face constraints on the supply chains they need to make this world a reality, particularly when it comes to chips. To address this, Musk earlier this year announced a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel to design and manufacture chips in Texas. “The most epic chip-building exercise by far,” he has said.
Musk at the wheel
For Musk, a merger would also solve two problems: demands on his attention and his lack of control at Tesla.
Tesla for years was Musk’s only public company, a status that came with greater scrutiny. There, Musk reports to a public board, as well as individual investors who make up around 30% of Tesla’s voting power, according to FactSet.
The question of Musk’s attention became a particular focus for investors and the board in recent years after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and launched xAI in 2023, and again in 2025 as he spent time in Washington, D.C., running the Department of Government Efficiency in the early months of President Trump’s second term.
As Tesla’s car business suffered in 2025, Musk threatened to take his AI ambitions outside the company if he wasn’t granted 25% voting control. Last November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk, which created a path for him to vastly expand his stake.
As of Sept. 30, Musk owned a roughly 20% stake in Tesla, according to the company’s proxy filing.
The SpaceX IPO gave Musk a different path. When SpaceX went public in June, the deal’s structure enabled him to have more than 80% voting power at the company—so much that he can’t be fired and decisions can’t be made without his support.
If SpaceX acquires Tesla, he will likely stay in control.
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