Maye Musk said she sleeps in a garage when visiting her son Elon in Texas, where his rocket company SpaceX is headquartered, rather than making the 45-minute journey to a hotel suite.
Speaking on Fox Business over the weekend, the writer and model said the accommodation was a small house with a small bed in the garage.
“It’s a small house and a small bed in the garage,” she said. “And I can sleep there, or 45 minutes to go in a suite in a hotel. No, I’ll sleep in the garage.”
Maye Musk said she was accustomed to making do with basic accommodation, recalling that she had slept in a garage after moving from South Africa back to Canada. She also said she had slept on the floor or a sofa while her children were at university, after removing pizza boxes.
She added that her career also gave her opportunities to stay in luxury hotels. Her son, however, has often chosen to sleep close to the businesses he is running.
Elon Musk’s workplace sleeping arrangements
Elon Musk, who has been reported as being worth $942 billion, recently confirmed that he was living in an Airstream trailer in Memphis while overseeing the expansion of xAI’s Colossus supercomputer centre.
He previously said that, for three years, his main residences had been the factories of electric vehicle maker Tesla. Speaking at the 2022 Baron Investment Conference, Musk recalled sleeping under his desk in the factory.
“For a while there I was just sleeping under my desk, which is out in the open in the factory for an important reason,” he said. “And it was damn uncomfortable sleeping on that floor. And always when I woke up, I’d smell like metal dust.”
Musk said colleagues could see him sleeping during shift changes, which he believed helped motivate the team. He had also slept on a sofa in a conference room, before returning to a couch after buying Twitter, now known as X.
In a 2023 interview with the BBC, Musk said he often slept at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, in a library on the building’s seventh floor “that nobody goes to.”
Maye Musk says her son ignored her advice
Maye Musk also said she had advised her son to focus on one business when he was considering electric cars, rockets and solar energy.
“He said to me, ‘Should I do electric cars, or rockets, or solar energy?’” she said. “I said, ‘You work so hard, just do one.’ He doesn’t listen to me. He did six companies, and they were all going to fail—remember? And now I’m so proud of him.”
