Elon Musk's mom isn't fussy about where she sleeps either—Maye Musk stays in a garage when she visits the Tesla CEO in Texas

Elon Musk may have extreme money, but the sleeping arrangements around him still sound improvised. In a recent Fox Business appearance, his mother, Maye Musk, said she stays in the garage when she visits him in Texas, where SpaceX is based. She described it as a small house, a small bed in the garage, and a choice between that and a hotel suite 45 minutes away. She picked the garage.

That fits the family script. Maye said she has slept in her own garage before, and when her children were at university she would sleep on the floor or couch after clearing away pizza boxes. She added that her work can also put her in luxury stays, but convenience seems to win when she’s around her son.

Musk has made the same point about himself for years: the closer to work, the better. He said onstage at the 2022 Baron Investment Conference that for three years his main homes were Tesla factories, and that he had slept under his desk because it was in the open and visible to the team. He said waking up there, covered in metal dust, was “damn uncomfortable,” but that his presence during shift change mattered to employees.

After buying Twitter, now X, he said in a 2023 BBC interview that he often slept at the San Francisco headquarters too, in a library on the seventh floor that “nobody goes to.” The pattern is plain enough. Musk treats sleep like another logistics problem, and apparently his mother does too.

Maye also recalled telling him to pick just one path when he was weighing electric cars, rockets, and solar energy. He didn’t take the advice. Ray Dalio has a similar story about warning Musk not to put $180 million from PayPal into a Mars plan that became SpaceX. Musk ignored both, and the rest is now very expensive history.