Table of Contents
American tech billionaire Elon Musk, the world's richest person with a fortune Bloomberg puts at $917 billion, says he is living in an Airstream trailer parked beside xAI's supercomputer site in Memphis while the company races to expand it.
"I am coming to you today from the palace that I live in in Memphis, which is an Airstream trailer," Musk said Monday, appearing by video during a taping of the All-In podcast alongside SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell.
Shotwell told the hosts the arrangement was nothing new. "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.
Musk did not say which Airstream he is using. The company's compact models fit a bed, kitchen and bathroom into about 16 feet of aluminum shell.
Why Memphis, and why now
The trailer sits at Colossus, the data center xAI built to train its Grok models. Construction began in 2024, and the first phase reportedly came online in 122 days. The site has since grown into one of the largest concentrations of AI computing power anywhere, with enough spare capacity that xAI has struck deals to sell some of it to Google and Anthropic. In late July it announced a fourth Memphis facility, called Minihard.
The stakes have risen this year. SpaceX acquired xAI in a deal reported at about $250 billion, folding Musk's rocket company and his AI lab into one business. Musk's own wealth briefly passed $1 trillion for 12 days in June, according to Fortune, before settling back.
The buildout has also drawn a fight over power. To run Colossus quickly, xAI installed dozens of temporary gas turbines, and the Southern Environmental Law Center and local groups have challenged their use under the Clean Air Act, arguing the company ran them without proper permits. The company has said the turbines were covered by a temporary exemption and has since moved some capacity onto the grid.
A long history of sleeping at work
Musk has done this before. According to Walter Isaacson's biography, he and his brother Kimbal slept in their Palo Alto office for six months while building Zip2 in the 1990s, and he later slept under his desk at X.com, the startup that became PayPal.
During Tesla's Model 3 production push in 2017 and 2018, he told Isaacson, the team was "getting four or five hours' sleep, often on the floor." After buying Twitter in 2022, he took a couch in the seventh-floor library and declared a "code-red situation."
Musk once owned a $17 million Bel Air mansion and a $32 million estate in Silicon Valley. He sold most of his properties in 2020 and moved to Texas, where he lived in a small rented house near SpaceX's Starbase.
The Airstream, then, is less a stunt than a pattern. Musk has said he would rather sleep steps from the servers than commute.
The intelligence satisfies curiosity. The paid briefings satisfy strategy.
Every Monday, Elite subscribers receive an Investor Memo breaking down the deal, the structure and the positioning behind the week's most consequential African wealth story - the kind of analysis that doesn't appear anywhere else.
Twice a month, a Wealth Intelligence brief profiles a single billionaire's holdings, cash flows and expansion pipeline in detail no public source matches.
→ Executive ($25/mo): Daily newsletter + Deep-Dive Reports
→ Elite ($75/mo): Everything above + Investor Memos + Wealth Intelligence + Quarterly Analyst Briefings
Subscribe now
