Elon Musk may be the richest man on the planet, but he and his mom aren’t particular about where they sleep—as long as it’s convenient.
The man, reportedly worth $942 billion and the richest person on the planet, recently confirmed he’s living in an Airstream trailer in Memphis to oversee xAI’s Colossus expansion, a massive supercomputer center.
It seems Musk’s mom, a writer and model, also isn’t picky about her digs when she visits her son.
Appearing on Fox Business over the weekend, Maye said she slept in a garage when visiting Musk in Texas, where rocket company SpaceX is headquartered.
“It’s a small house and a small bed in the garage,” Maye said. “And I can sleep there, or 45 minutes to go in a suite in a hotel. No, I’ll sleep in the garage.”
“When my mom moved from South Africa back to Canada, she slept in her garage, and when my kids were in school—at university—I slept on the floor, on the couch—after taking the pizza boxes off, I mean.”
While Maye added that her career often allows her to enjoy luxury stays as well, her son’s many roles mean he famously rests as close to work as he can get. Musk previously confirmed that for three years his primary residences were the factories of EV maker Tesla.
“For a while there I was just sleeping under my desk, which is out in the open in the factory for an important reason,” he said at the 2022 Baron Investment Conference. “And it was damn uncomfortable sleeping on that floor. And always when I woke up, I’d smell like metal dust.”
He explained: “The team could see me sleeping on the floor during shift change, I was just met with nothing. They knew I was there, and that made a huge difference, and then they gave it their all.”
Musk said at the time he had also slept on a couch in a conference room, but swapped it for under his desk. The entrepreneur returned to sleeping on a couch after purchasing the social media platform Twitter, now known as X.
In an interview with the BBC’s James Clayton in 2023, Musk said he often slept in the San Francisco headquarters—specifically in a library on the building’s seventh floor “that nobody goes to.”
‘He doesn’t listen’
Musk wouldn’t be the world’s first trillionaire—or thereabouts—if he had listened to all the advice he was given.
Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio, for example, remembers telling Musk not to sink his $180 million in proceeds from the sale of PayPal into a quest for life on Mars—an idea that later became SpaceX. The company now has a market cap of more than $2 trillion.
But Dalio isn’t alone—Musk also took little heed of his mom’s advice at the time.
“He said to me, ‘Should I do electric cars, or rockets, or solar energy?'” Maye told Fox. “I said, ‘You work so hard, just do one.’ He doesn’t listen to me. He did six companies, and they were all going to fail—remember? And now I’m so proud of him.”