Elon Musk — worth $917 billion by Bloomberg's count — is sleeping in a 16-foot Airstream trailer in Memphis so he can personally oversee the buildout of America's most powerful AI supercomputer complex, even as he drops Apple from an antitrust lawsuit that alleged the iPhone maker rigged the market for its favored chatbot.
The stake for ordinary Americans is straightforward: the man building the computing infrastructure that could determine whether the U.S. stays ahead in AI is doing it from a camper parked next to the servers, while the corporate establishment he's suing over market manipulation gets to walk away without explanation.
Musk appeared via video from his new "palace" — his word — on the All-In podcast alongside SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who told the hosts: "This is Elon, by the way, doing what people don't believe he does. He sleeps on the factory floor. He's in Memphis, helping build buildings." Fortune reported that Musk said he'd rather sleep steps from the new servers than commute.
The Memphis operation is xAI's Colossus supercomputer center, built in 122 days starting in 2024 to power the Grok language model. The complex has generated so much excess computing capacity that xAI has struck deals to provide it to Google and Anthropic for billions. A fourth data center, called Minihard, was announced in late July.
Meanwhile, the legal front is shifting. According to Europe Says, X Corp and SpaceXAI — the combined entity formed after SpaceX acquired xAI for $250 billion earlier this year, per the Daily Beast — filed to dismiss Apple from an antitrust lawsuit originally brought in August 2025. The suit alleged Apple's decision to make ChatGPT the only generative AI chatbot built into iOS gave OpenAI an unfair structural advantage, with ChatGPT controlling roughly 80 percent of the chatbot market while Grok held only a few percent. The filing doesn't explain why Apple was dropped or whether a settlement was reached. OpenAI remains the sole defendant.
The original lawsuit followed weeks of Musk publicly complaining that Grok and X weren't appearing in Apple's "Must Have" App Store section. He accused Apple of "playing politics" — a claim that resonates given the tech giant's history of curating what users see based on institutional preferences.
Fortune and the Daily Beast both framed the trailer story as quirky billionaire behavior. The Daily Beast leaned into the novelty — "very on-brand for the space fanatic" — and noted a new Alex Gibney documentary premiering at Toronto. Fortune buried the fact that Musk has done this at every critical juncture of his career: sleeping at Zip2's office and showering at the YMCA in the '90s, under his desk at X.com in 1999, on the Tesla factory floor during the 2017-2018 "production hell," and on a couch at Twitter's headquarters in 2022. Neither outlet connected the pattern to the antitrust fight — the man building from the floor is also fighting the gatekeepers in court.
The Daily Beast noted merger speculation between Tesla and SpaceX, quoting Musk: "With all this collaboration on so many levels, you can imagine an action one might take when there is so much close collaboration in so many areas." The Daily Beast also reported that in 2024, the New York Times found Musk had purchased a cluster of three Austin mansions for about $35 million — a detail that complicates the monk-in-a-trailer narrative, though it's consistent with a man who keeps a home base while camping at the work site.
The question that matters: Apple walks away from an antitrust suit with no public accounting, while the guy who built the competing product in 122 days sleeps next to his servers. Who's building, and who's just protecting turf?
