4 minBusiness
Musk Says He Is Living in an Airstream Trailer in Memphis to Oversee xAI's Colossus Expansion
Elon Musk says he has moved into an Airstream trailer in Memphis to personally oversee xAI's rapid buildout of its Colossus supercomputer campus, the company's largest infrastructure project to date.
Elon Musk, the world's richest man, says he is living in an Airstream trailer in Memphis, parked steps from the supercomputer campus where xAI is racing to expand its computing capacity. Musk described the trailer as his new «palace» during a taping of the All-In podcast alongside Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president and chief operating officer.
Shotwell framed the arrangement as characteristic of Musk's approach to projects that demand his direct attention. «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.
The move comes as xAI expands Colossus, the massive supercomputer center that has given the company enough computing power to strike deals supplying excess capacity to Google and Anthropic for billions of dollars. xAI began building Colossus in 2024 to provide compute for Grok, its large language model, and the initial build reportedly took only 122 days. In late July, the company announced a fourth data center called Minihard, adding to its existing facilities in the Memphis area.
Musk did not specify which Airstream model he is using, but some of the aluminum-shelled campers fit a sleeping area, kitchen and bathroom into roughly 16 feet of space. The trailer marks a modest shift from the factory floors and office couches that have housed him during past crunch periods, though it keeps him equally close to the work.
His habit of sleeping near the action dates back decades. While building Zip2 with his brother Kimbal in the 1990s, Musk slept in a small Palo Alto office for six months and showered at the YMCA, according to Walter Isaacson's biography. After selling Zip2 to Compaq for $22 million, he slept under his desk most nights while preparing to launch, the online bank that became PayPal. Even after eBay's acquisition of PayPal brought him roughly $175 million, he often stayed at colleagues' homes during Silicon Valley trips, including that of Michael Marks, who briefly served as Tesla's CEO in 2007.
The pattern was most pronounced during Tesla's «production hell» in 2017 and 2018, when the company pushed to build 5,000 Model 3s per week, nearly double its previous rate. Musk told Isaacson the period was «a frenzy of insanity,» with four or five hours of sleep, often on the floor. He spent Thanksgiving Day at the factory with some of his sons after asking workers to work that day as well. In 2022, after buying Twitter, he claimed a couch in the company's seventh-floor library and slept there while pushing employees toward his vision of a «digital town square,» telling journalist Bari Weiss the company was in a «code-red situation.»
Musk has not always lived modestly. In 2012 he bought a Bel Air mansion with seven bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, a tennis court and a two-story library for $17 million, 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, he sold many of his properties and moved to Texas with then-partner Claire Boucher, known as Grimes, where they lived in a small $50,000 house he rented from SpaceX near the Starbase facility in Boca Chica.
Now, with the Memphis expansion heating up, Musk appears to want to be close to the action again. He has traded the factory floor, at least, for the comfort of his own trailer.
