The Daily Pennsylvanian is turning a house where Elon Musk stayed into its new high-tech home

The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student-run independent news organization that focuses its reporting on the University of Pennsylvania, will mark its final separation from the Ivy League school its reporters cover when it moves out of its offices at a Penn warehouse and into the home it has purchased at 3721 Chestnut St.

The DP Foundation, a year-old fundraising affiliate, last summer paid $1.7 million for this six-bedroom rowhouse with a history: The last surviving house on a block now lined with high-rise apartment towers, it’s one of the places where classmates and biographers say Elon Musk, now the world’s richest man and boss of Tesla, Starlink, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter), lived as a student.

Musk attended Penn from 1992 through 1995, graduating (by the time his paperwork cleared in 1997) with degrees in physics and economics.

“It’s very exciting for us: We will be 100% independent,” said Molly Cohen, a Penn junior and president of the student-run news organization, which brings in $1 million a year in revenue.

She said the foundation that helps fund the Daily Pennsylvanian — universally dubbed the DP — is raising funds to turn the house into “the media hub on campus,” the place where, at a school with no undergraduate journalism major, journalists can gather for programs and work “in a comfortable professional environment” and in up-to-date facilities.

Cohen said the group hopes to someday broaden coverage beyond Penn and host new media groups.

If work begins on schedule this year, the DP will in 2025 leave its longtime offices in the Greek-temple-fronted University Records Center warehouse building at 4015 Walnut St., known to students as the “Pink Palace,” which it rents from the university.

The move will end that landlord relationship and the DP’s formal ties to the institution its reporters and editors cover, which, with its dozen professional and undergraduate schools, and its teaching hospitals and other programs, is Philadelphia’s largest private employer.

The rent Penn charged the DP as a tenant kept escalating, from $1 in the early 1980s to over $100,000 this year, noted Chuck Cohen (no relation to the president), a former DP managing editor who chairs the DP Foundation board. “It was time to do our own thing.”

Chuck Cohen, who is managing director at Benco Dental Co., based near Scranton., said he and other DP alumni, most of whom aren’t journalists, have gladly donated to fund the students’ vision for a place of their own.

Despite the published reports linking Musk to the property, Cohen is circumspect: “I’m told Elon Musk lived there. I haven’t confirmed it. It’s part of the local legend.”

The seller of the DP’s new office, University City Housing Co., “could have gotten more” for the property — but owner Michael Karp liked the idea of selling to the DP, said Andy Margolis, of A Margolis Realty Co., who brokered the sale.

DP leaders say Margolis convinced Karp to sell the building, which hadn’t been listed. University City Housing had rented the off-campus house since at least the 1980s.

Margolis said the Chestnut Street deal capped a long search for a suitable property. “Karp did a handshake agreement. That’s trust.”

The three-story house, with brick-patterned stucco over soft local green serpentine stone on a lot 25 feet wide and half a block deep, will be expanded and given a new glass-and-panel facade.

The move comes 40 years after student and alumni backers of what was then a daily print newspaper — now a print weekly with continuously updated reports online — separated from the university and set up a fund to support independent operations, including an eventual new home.

“This has been a long time coming,” said Jesse Zhang, a Penn senior and Molly Cohen’s predecessor as the DP president. He credited alumni donors and the newsroom’s firm financial footing from advertising, now largely digital.

The new building will be renovated to fit updated versions of the “podcasting studios and green screens and emerging and advanced technologies” the DP added to its current home, and new facilities, said Steven Molberger, the foundation’s executive director.

He said the foundation has collected commitments totaling $2.5 million so far for the expansion and upgrades. A website highlighting donors and asking for more will go live next month. “This represents true financial freedom for the organization,” he added.

According to biographers and news accounts relying on classmates and friends, including venture capitalist Adeo Ressi, a longtime Musk confidant, the Space X and Tesla boss stayed at 3721 Chestnut St. for part of the period when he was earning degrees in physics and economics.

Citing Musk’s biographers, Molberger said the Musk ties to the property are inspirational: “He got significant work done there. He spent a lot of time on projects. He souped up the electrical system” at the house.

Musk transferred to Penn from his former school in Canada in 1992. Friends and classmates have also said he lived at the Quad, the brick, gargoyle-studded dorm complex along Spruce Street where mostly first-year students reside. Biographers say he was briefly assigned there as a transfer student, and he later served as a residential adviser there in his senior year.

Bill Groves, a manager since the late 1980s for Karp’s University City Housing, calculates that Musk lived in the house for the two years between his Quad stints.

The house was rented for four years to Musk’s friend Ressi, who lined up many of the students for its six bedrooms, including Musk, Ressi has told reporters and biographers.

Groves remembers the energetic Ressi vividly; Musk didn’t stand out.

Groves confirmed reports that the young men hosted parties at the house but said it was “not notorious” as the loud party center some media accounts have described, unlike some other student houses that the company owned in those days.

What was special at 3721 Chestnut in the Ressi and Musk era was the number of computer hookups the friends and future tech company heads installed. “Those guys had more phone lines than a high-rise,” Groves said. “They had copper cable coming in that was as thick as my arm, stapled to the walls.

“That was back in the modem days,” when computers still needed individual phone lines to talk to other machines — making the future DP home a node for nerds with vision, back in the infancy of the internet.

The story has been updated to correct the address of the “Pink Palace” and Steven Molberger’s title.