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

Elon Musk has apparently moved into an Airstream trailer in Memphis, right by xAI’s latest push to expand Colossus, its big supercomputer site. On Monday, he called the trailer his new “palace” while appearing on the All-In podcast with Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer.

The location matters because Colossus has become the engine room for xAI. The system was built to feed Grok, xAI’s large language model, and the company says the initial build went up in 122 days. It has also grown so much that xAI has struck deals to sell excess computing capacity to Google and Anthropic for billions.

Memphis is now where the action is. In late July, xAI said it would add a fourth data center there, called Minihard, to go with its other facilities. Musk did not say which Airstream he is using, though some models cram a sleeping area, kitchen and bathroom into just 16 feet.

The trailer fits a long Musk pattern. He has slept on factory floors, in tiny offices and, later, on a couch in Twitter’s seventh-floor library when he was pushing the company that became X. But he has also lived large when he wanted to, from a $17 million Bel Air mansion to a $32 million estate in Silicon Valley. For now, though, the billionaire who briefly became a trillionaire is back to living close to the machinery.