There’s nothing like a mother’s love, and when you’re the richest man in the world, you probably have a unique way of showing her you appreciate it.
For Elon Musk, that means treating your mom to a lovely bed in your garage when she comes into town to visit.
Musk’s mother, Sports Illustrated Cover Model Maye Musk, revealed in a new interview with European publication The Times that she abides by rather unorthodox sleeping arrangements when she goes to visit her son in his Texas home, where SpaceX headquarters are located.
“You can’t have a fancy house near a rocket site,” she told The Times after explaining that she must “sleep in the garage” when she’s in town.
Musk and his mother share a special bond, the billionaire even bringing Maye as his date to the Met Ball this past spring.
And when Sports Illustrated asked Musk what accomplishment she was most proud of in her life, her answer was simple.
“I’m most proud of my three kids, of course,” she said. “I’m very excited for everything they do.”
Yet Musk’s humble living arrangements for both himself and his visitors aren’t all too surprising given that back in April, he revealed in an interview with TED’s Chris Anderson that he wasn’t even living in a permanent home but was in fact couch surfing.
“If I travel to the Bay Area, which is where most of Tesla’s engineering is, I basically rotate through friends’ spare bedrooms,” Musk said of his low-possession lifestyle. “I don’t have a yacht. I really don’t take vacations. It’s not as though my personal consumption is high. The one exception is a plane, but if I don’t use the plane, then I have less hours to work.”
Musk even riffed on The Post’s reporting of the garage bedroom situation by Tweeting in response to the article.
“I’ve done a lot with the place,” he joked.
Musk’s former partner and mother to two of his children, musician Grimes, corroborated this unexpectedly modest style of living in an interview with Vanity Fair where she recalled how the billionaire refused to purchase a new mattress when the couple was living together in Los Angeles after she discovered a hole in her side.
“Bro wouldn’t even get a new mattress,” Grimes bluntly told the publication. “Bro does not live like a billionaire. Bro lives at times below the poverty line. To the point where I was like, can we not live in a very insecure $40,000 house? Where the neighbors, like, film us, and there’s no security, and I’m eating peanut butter for eight days in a row?”
As of Monday afternoon, Musk’s estimated net worth was $255.6 billion, making him the richest man in the world.