Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, says he’s living in an Airstream trailer to oversee xAI’s biggest expansion yet

Elon Musk, the world's richest man, has some new digs—an Airstream trailer in Memphis, parked just steps from xAI's most ambitious project yet.

Musk, who has a net worth of $917 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index and became the world's first trillionaire for 12 days in June, said Monday he was in his new "palace" as he spoke during a taping of the All-In podcast alongside Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX.

Shotwell, for her part, praised Musk's latest unusual home as an example of his long history of committing fully to projects he cares about throughout his career.

"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.

Musk is in Memphis as xAI races to expand Colossus , a massive supercomputer center that has provided it with so much computing power that it has struck deals to provide excess capacity to Google and Anthropic for billions. The company started building Colossus in 2024 to provide compute for Grok, xAI's large language model, and the initial build reportedly took only 122 days.

While putting a data center in space could still be far off, Memphis has emerged as the center of xAI's infrastructure buildout here on Earth. In late July, the company announced it would build a fourth data center called Minihard that will add to its other facilities.

Musk did not say which Airstream model he was living in, but some of the aluminum-shelled campers pack a sleeping area, kitchen, and bathroom into a 16-foot space .

Still, Musk has been known to want to sleep close to the action when a new project interested him or required his direct attention. When Musk and his brother Kimbal were building their first startup, Zip2, in the '90s, they slept in a tiny Palo Alto office for six months while showering at the YMCA, according to Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk.

Even as a newfound multi-millionaire, having received $22 million from selling Zip2 to Compaq, Musk slept under his desk most nights as he prepared to launch X.com, the online bank that would later become PayPal, in 1999 , according to Isaacson's biography.

Even when he rose to the rank of super wealthy, having received another approximately $175 million from eBay's acquisition of PayPal , he often stayed at colleagues' homes while traveling in Silicon Valley, including the home of Michael Marks, who briefly served as Tesla CEO in 2007 before the pair clashed and Musk later took over the role.