Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has some new digs—an Airstream trailer in Memphis, parked just steps from xAI’s most ambitious project yet.
Musk, who has a net worth of $917 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index and became the world’s first trillionaire for 12 days in June, said Monday he was in his new “palace” as he spoke during a taping of the All-In podcast alongside Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX.
Shotwell, for her part, praised Musk’s latest unusual home as an example of his long history of committing fully to projects he cares about throughout his career.
“This is Elon, by the way, doing what people don’t believe he does. He sleeps on the factory floor. He’s in Memphis, helping build buildings,” she said during the interview.
Musk is in Memphis as xAI races to expand Colossus, a massive supercomputer center that has provided it with so much computing power that it has struck deals to provide excess capacity to Google and Anthropic for billions. The company started building Colossus in 2024 to provide compute for Grok, xAI’s large language model, and the initial build reportedly took only 122 days.
While putting a data center in space could still be far off, Memphis has emerged as the center of xAI’s infrastructure buildout here on Earth. In late July, the company announced it would build a fourth data center called Minihard that will add to its other facilities.
Musk did not say which Airstream model he was living in, but some of the aluminum-shelled campers pack a sleeping area, kitchen, and bathroom into a 16-foot space.
Still, Musk has been known to want to sleep close to the action when a new project interested him or required his direct attention. When Musk and his brother Kimbal were building their first startup, Zip2, in the ‘90s, they slept in a tiny Palo Alto office for six months while showering at the YMCA, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk.
Even as a newfound multi-millionaire, having received $22 million from selling Zip2 to Compaq, Musk slept under his desk most nights as he prepared to launch X.com, the online bank that would later become PayPal, in 1999, according to Isaacson’s biography.
Even when he rose to the rank of super wealthy, having received another approximately $175 million from eBay’s acquisition of PayPal, he often stayed at colleagues’ homes while traveling in Silicon Valley, including the home of Michael Marks, who briefly served as Tesla CEO in 2007 before the pair clashed and Musk later took over the role.
Musk’s habit of finding a resting place close to the action was even more pronounced during the “production hell” era in 2017 and 2018 when Tesla aimed to churn out 5,000 Model 3s per week, nearly double the rate it was producing previously.
“It was a frenzy of insanity,” he told Isaacson of that time. “We were getting four or five hours’ sleep, often on the floor. I remember thinking, ‘I’m like on the ragged edge of sanity.’”
During that production rush, he spent Thanksgiving Day at the factory with some of his sons because he had asked workers to work that day as well, wrote Isaacson.
Finally, when in 2022 he purchased the social media website Twitter , which would later become X, Musk claimed a couch in the company’s seventh-floor library and slept there as he pushed employees to realize his vision of turning Twitter into a “digital town square.” He said in an interview with journalist Bari Weiss that he needed to sleep in the office because the company was in a “code-red situation.”
To be sure, Musk didn’t shy away from spending his money on lavish homes for years. He bought a mansion in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, complete with seven bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, a tennis court, and a two-story library for $17 million in 2012, according to his biography. He also owned a $32 million Mediterranean-style estate in Silicon Valley and bought late actor Gene Wilder’s home in 2013 to try to preserve it.
In 2020, though, Musk sold many of his properties and moved with his then-partner Claire Boucher, known as Grimes, to Texas, where they lived in a small, $50,000 house he was renting from SpaceX near the company’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica.
Now, with xAI’s Memphis expansion heating up, Musk seems to want to be close to the action once again, and he’s traded in the factory floor, at least, for the comfort of his own trailer.
