The world's richest person, Elon Musk, has revealed he is currently living in an Airstream caravan trailer to stay close to the largest expansion project ever undertaken by xAI. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk's net worth stands at $917 billion; in June of this year, he briefly became the world's first trillionaire, a status he held for just 12 days.
On Monday, while recording an episode of the "All-In" podcast, Musk shared that he has moved into this new "palace." Joining him for the recording was Gwynne Shotwell, Chief Operating Officer of SpaceX. Shotwell praised Musk's unconventional living arrangement, noting that throughout his career, whenever he commits to a major project he believes in, he immerses himself completely, and this time is no different. "It's hard for people to imagine Elon doing something like this. He will just sleep on the factory floor. Right now, he's in Memphis, involved in building construction," she said during the interview.
Musk's presence in Memphis is driven by xAI's accelerated expansion of the Colossus supercomputing center. This facility generates massive computing power, and xAI has begun renting out surplus capacity to Google and Anthropic, securing deals worth billions of dollars. The project, launched in 2024, was specifically built to provide computing power for xAI's large-scale model Grok. The first phase reportedly took only 122 days to complete.
While the idea of building data centers in space remains distant, Memphis has become the core hub for xAI's terrestrial computing infrastructure. At the end of July, the company announced plans to construct a fourth data center, named Minihard, to expand its existing computing capabilities.
Musk did not specify the exact model of his Airstream trailer. This aluminum-shelled camper, measuring just 16 feet, cleverly integrates a sleeping area, kitchen, and bathroom into its compact space. Musk has a long-standing habit of staying near the site of any major project that requires his personal supervision.
According to Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk, in the 1990s, while founding his startup Zip2 with his brother Kimbal, Musk slept in a cramped office in Palo Alto for six straight months, showering at the local YMCA. Even after selling Zip2 to Compaq for $22 million, making him a newly minted multi-millionaire, Musk still spent most nights sleeping under his desk in 1999 while preparing to launch the online bank X.com, which later evolved into PayPal.
After eBay acquired PayPal, Musk gained another approximately $175 million. By then, he was already a super-rich individual, but when traveling in Silicon Valley, he often crashed at colleagues' homes, including Michael Marks, who briefly served as CEO of Tesla Motors in 2007 and later had disagreements with Musk.
During 2017 and 2018, when Tesla Motors was mired in "production hell," aiming to boost Model 3 output to 5,000 units per week—nearly double its previous capacity—Musk's practice of resting on-site became even more extreme. He recalled that period to Isaacson: "It was completely insane, working around the clock. I was sleeping only four or five hours a day, often directly on the floor. I remember feeling like I was on the verge of a mental breakdown." During that production sprint, Musk also stayed at the factory on Thanksgiving Day, keeping his sons company as they worked alongside him; he had asked employees to work through the holiday, as described in the biography.
In 2022, when acquiring the social media platform Twitter (now rebranded X), Musk slept on a sofa in the library on the building's seventh floor, driving the team to realize his vision of transforming Twitter into a "digital town square." In an interview with journalist Bari Weiss, he stated that the company was in a "red alert" state, necessitating him to live in the office.
Of course, in his earlier years, Musk did not hesitate to spend lavishly on luxury homes. The biography recounts that in 2012, he spent $17 million on a mansion in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, complete with seven bedrooms, eleven bathrooms, a tennis court, and a two-story library. He also owned a $32 million Mediterranean-style estate in Silicon Valley and purchased the former home of the late actor Gene Wilder in 2013, hoping to preserve it.
But in 2020, Musk sold off a significant portion of his properties and, with his then-partner Grimes (whose real name is Claire Boucher), moved to Texas, renting a modest $50,000 house near SpaceX's Starbase facility. Now, as xAI's Memphis expansion enters its critical phase, Musk is once again choosing to stay at the project's front lines—this time, however, not sleeping on a factory floor, but in his very own caravan.
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