Elon Musk is the world’s richest man by a country mile, with a current net worth of $954 billion. So, it came as a shock to everyone when the billionaire revealed that he is currently living in an Airstream trailer in Memphis, Tennessee, while overseeing xAI’s expanding data center operations. The timing is notable because Musk’s own Gulfstream G650ER business jet has a passenger cabin that is almost 47 feet long, which makes it longer than every current Airstream travel trailer. A few days back, Musk’s Gulfstream G650ER N628TS flew from San Jose to Memphis in approximately three hours and 10 minutes. The next day, he spoke about his trailer home during an appearance at an event hosted by the All-In podcast.
According to a Business Insider report, Musk has been personally embedded in Memphis in recent months as SpaceX, which absorbed xAI earlier this year, works to bring more GPU capacity online. Rather than commuting to the expanding operation, Musk said he has been sleeping just steps from the servers while overseeing the Macrohard data center buildout. During the event, he referred to the Airstream as his “palace,” prompting laughter from the hosts and SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell. Shotwell then pointed to Musk’s long history of sleeping at workplaces, saying that he was in Memphis helping build the facilities.
Living beside xAI’s expanding computing empire
Musk’s trailer is now sitting in the middle of one of xAI’s most significant infrastructure expansions. The company began building Colossus in 2024 to provide computing power for Grok, with the initial build reportedly completed in just 122 days. Colossus has since become large enough for xAI to strike deals to provide excess computing capacity to Google and Anthropic. In late July, xAI also announced plans for a fourth Memphis data center called Minihard, further expanding the company’s computing footprint in the city.
The Airstream itself also has an unexpected connection to Musk’s wider business world. SpaceX’s first Starbase engineers reportedly lived in Airstreams, while a cluster of Airstreams near Musk’s leased house at Starbase has been used to accommodate visiting VIPs. Airstream has been producing its distinctive riveted-aluminum trailers since the 1930s, with its iconic “silver bullet” design introduced in 1936. A 1960 Airstream Bambi is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art, while NASA used a modified Airstream to quarantine the Apollo 11 astronauts after their return from the Moon.
A familiar Musk habit, in a new setting
The Memphis trailer is the first time Musk has publicly said he is living in a trailer, but sleeping close to his work is hardly new for him. In the mid-1990s, he and his brother Kimbal reportedly slept in a small Palo Alto office for six months while building Zip2 and showered at the YMCA. Even after receiving $22 million from the sale of Zip2, Musk reportedly slept under his desk most nights while preparing to launch X.com in 1999. After eBay acquired PayPal and Musk received roughly $175 million, he still often stayed at colleagues’ homes while traveling through Silicon Valley.
That pattern became especially visible during Tesla’s 2017 and 2018 production push, when Musk slept on the Fremont factory floor and on a conference-room couch as the company worked toward producing 5,000 Model 3s per week. He later recalled getting four or five hours of sleep during what he described as a period of intense pressure. Musk also spent Thanksgiving at the factory with some of his sons after asking employees to work that day. When he showed the conference-room couch to CBS’s Gayle King, a fan launched a “Buy Elon Musk a Couch” GoFundMe campaign that raised more than $5,000 in a single day.
His residential choices changed again in 2020, when Musk tweeted that he would “own no house” and subsequently sold seven California properties, including a $17 million Bel Air home and Gene Wilder’s former house. From 2021 onward, he described his primary home near SpaceX’s Starbase as a roughly $50,000 house rented from the company, while a 375-square-foot Boxabl prefab nearby was described as a guest house. After acquiring Twitter in 2022, he again slept at company headquarters, using a couch in the library while conference rooms were converted into bedrooms. This was the arrangement that prompted a San Francisco building-inspection probe.
Against that history, Musk’s Memphis Airstream is another unusually modest address for a billionaire whose private jet offers an entirely different kind of space. His G650ER can carry him from San Jose to Memphis in no time, with a cabin nearly 47 feet long, while the trailer waiting for him near the xAI operation is smaller than that cabin. The difference is striking, to say the least. For now, Musk appears to be using the Airstream as his Memphis base while one of the largest computing expansions associated with his companies takes shape around him.
Note – At the time of writing, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Elon Musk has a net worth of $954 billion.
