Abstract:
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has a new home — an Airstream trailer in Memphis parked just steps away from xAI’s most ambitious project to date. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows Musk’s net worth reaches $917 billion. In June this year, he briefly became the world's first trillionaire, although it only lasted 12 days. On Monday, Musk said during a recording of the "All-In" podcast with SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwen Shotwell that he was living in this new "palace."
Shotwell praised Musk's latest quirky residence as an example of Musk's career-long commitment to projects he cares about.
She said: "This is Elon, doing things that people can't imagine. He once slept on the factory floor, and now he is in Memphis, participating in the construction of factories."
Musk lives in Memphis because xAI is working hard to expand its Colossus supercomputing center. This large-scale computing power center provides xAI with massive computing power, and xAI has also reached an agreement to lease excess computing power to Google and Anthropic, with the transaction amount reaching billions of dollars. The center will start construction in 2024. Its original intention is to provide computing power support for xAI's large model Grok. It is reported that the first phase of the project was completed in only 122 days.
Although the idea of deploying data centers in space is still far away, Memphis has become the core base for xAI to build computing infrastructure on the ground. In late July, xAI announced that it would build a fourth data center, Minihard, to expand its existing computing facilities.
Musk did not reveal which Airstream trailer he was staying in. Some models of this aluminum-shell camper can integrate a sleeping area, kitchen and bathroom into a small space of 16 feet.
Nonetheless, Musk has always had the habit of wanting to live near the project site when a new project interests him or requires his personal supervision. The biography of Musk written by Walter Isaacson records that in the 1990s, when Musk and his brother Kimbal founded their first start-up company Zip2, the two slept in a small office in Palo Alto for six months and could only go to the YMCA to take a bath.
Isacson's biography also mentions that even after Musk sold Zip2, received $22 million from Compaq, and became a new multimillionaire, he still slept under his desk most nights during the preparations for the launch of the online bank [X.com] (later PayPal) in 1999.
Even after eBay acquired PayPal and Musk once again received about 175 million US dollars and became one of the super rich, he often stayed at the homes of colleagues when he was on business trips in Silicon Valley, including the residence of Michael Marks. Max briefly served as Tesla CEO in 2017. After a conflict between the two, Musk took over the position.
From 2017 to 2018, Tesla was deep in "capacity hell", and Musk's habit of staying nearby was particularly obvious. At that time, Tesla's goal was to mass produce 5,000 Model 3 vehicles per week, which was almost double its previous production capacity.
Recalling that time to Isaacson, Musk said: "It was absolutely crazy. We could only sleep four or five hours a day, often directly on the floor. I remember thinking: 'I'm almost going to have a nervous breakdown.'"
Isacson wrote that during that production capacity crisis, Musk and his sons spent Thanksgiving at the factory because he asked employees to work overtime that day.
Finally in 2022, Musk acquired the social media platform Twitter (later renamed X). In order to promote his idea of turning Twitter into a "digital city square" among employees, he occupied a sofa in the library on the seventh floor of the company and slept directly there. He said in an interview that the company was in a "red state of emergency" so he had to sleep in the office.
It is true that Musk has also spent a lot of money on luxury mansions. According to biographical records, in 2012 he purchased a mansion in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, equipped with 7 bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, a tennis court and a two-story library for $17 million. He also owned a Mediterranean-style Silicon Valley estate worth $32 million and bought the late actor Gene Wilder's home in 2013 with the intention of preserving it.
However, in 2020, Musk sold a large number of properties under his name and moved to Texas with his then partner Claire Boucher (stage name Grimes). They rented a small house worth $50,000 near SpaceX, just around the corner from the Starbase factory in Boca Chica.
Now, with the xAI Memphis expansion project in full swing, Musk once again seems to want to stay on the front line of the project. Only this time, he no longer slept on the factory floor, but instead slept on a relatively comfortable trailer.
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