Elon Musk, worth $917B, is living in an Airstream to oversee xAI's supercomputer

Elon Musk, the world's richest man with a net worth of $917 billion, is trading mansions for a trailer. He said Monday during a taping of the All-In podcast that he is living in an Airstream parked steps from xAI's Memphis data center, calling it his new "palace." The setting is not a retreat; it is the command post for xAI's most ambitious expansion yet.

The trailer sits at the center of Colossus, a massive supercomputer center that xAI began building in 2024 to power its Grok large language model. The initial build reportedly took just 122 days, and the compute it unlocked has already led to deals to sell excess capacity to Google and Anthropic for billions. In late July, xAI announced a fourth data center, Minihard, adding to its other facilities. Musk's presence on site signals how much he is betting on infrastructure speed.

This is not a new instinct. According to Walter Isaacson's biography, Musk and his brother Kimbal slept in a tiny Palo Alto office for six months while building Zip2 in the 1990s, showering at the YMCA. After selling Zip2 to Compaq for $22 million, Musk still slept under his desk most nights as he prepared to launch X.com, the online bank that became PayPal, in 1999. Even after eBay acquired PayPal for roughly $175 million, he often stayed at colleagues' homes in Silicon Valley, including that of Michael Marks, who briefly served as Tesla CEO in 2007.

The pattern intensified during Tesla's "production hell" in 2017 and 2018, when the company aimed to build 5,000 Model 3s per week, nearly double its prior rate. Musk told Isaacson, "It was a frenzy of insanity. We were getting four or five hours' sleep, often on the floor. I remember thinking, 'I'm like on the ragged edge of sanity.