Elon Musk has moved into an Airstream trailer in Memphis to stay close to xAI’s expanding Colossus supercomputer project, describing the temporary accommodation as his new “palace”.
Musk revealed the arrangement during a recording of the All-In podcast, where he appeared alongside Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer.
Shotwell said the trailer reflected Musk’s longstanding habit of living alongside major projects when they demand his 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.
xAI is expanding Colossus, the Memphis data centre built to provide computing power for Grok, the company’s large language model. Construction began in 2024, and the initial facility reportedly took 122 days to complete.
The computing capacity generated by Colossus has also enabled xAI to strike multi-billion-dollar deals to provide excess capacity to Google and Anthropic. In late July, the company announced plans for a fourth Memphis data centre, Minihard.
Musk did not disclose which Airstream model he is using. Some of the company’s aluminium-shelled trailers include a sleeping area, kitchen and bathroom within a 16-foot space.
Elon Musk’s history of staying close to projects
The entrepreneur has previously chosen basic accommodation while working on demanding ventures. In the 1990s, he and his brother Kimbal reportedly slept for six months in a small Palo Alto office while building their first company, Zip2, and used a YMCA for showers.
After selling Zip2 to Compaq for $22 million, Musk is said to have continued sleeping under his desk while preparing to launch X.com, the online bank that later became PayPal.
His preference for remaining close to work was particularly pronounced during Tesla’s “production hell” in 2017 and 2018, when the company was attempting to produce 5,000 Model 3 cars a week. “It was a frenzy of insanity,” Musk recalled. “We were getting four or five hours’ sleep, often on the floor. I remember thinking, ‘I’m like on the ragged edge of sanity.’”
He also spent Thanksgiving at a Tesla factory during that production drive after asking staff to work that day, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk. In 2022, after buying Twitter, he said he slept on a couch in the company’s seventh-floor library because it was in a “code-red situation”.
Musk has owned substantial properties, including a Bel Air mansion bought for $17 million in 2012, a $32 million estate in Silicon Valley and the former home of actor Gene Wilder. In 2020, however, he sold many of his properties and moved to Texas, where he lived with his then-partner Claire Boucher, known as Grimes, in a small house rented from SpaceX near its Starbase facility in Boca Chica.
With xAI’s Memphis expansion gathering pace, Musk is once again choosing to live near the work, this time swapping the factory floor for a trailer beside the company’s latest infrastructure project.
