Maye Musk, the 78-year-old mother of Elon, Kimbal and Tosca Musk, says she sleeps in her eldest son's garage whenever she visits him at Starbase, SpaceX's rocket development and launch site in South Texas, and she considers it a luxury rather than a sacrifice. A couch or a mattress on the floor is more than sufficient for her, she says, framing it as a small comfort compared to the decades she spent scraping by as a single mother raising three children largely on her own.
The comments come as Musk promotes her new memoir, Timeless: The Art of Reinvention and Resilience at Any Age, published by Harper Wave and out now, according to the New York Post. She has said sleeping on the floor is a luxury as long as there is a roof over her head, a line that echoes childhood memories of camping in the Kalahari Desert and years of couch-surfing until she turned 60. This is not the first time her Starbase sleeping arrangements have made headlines: she first described bunking in the garage during a 2022 interview with The Times UK, telling the outlet that luxury housing simply cannot be built near an active rocket launchpad, as Business Insider reported at the time.
A Modest Setup, Even for the Man Who Lives There
The garage belongs to a home that is itself famously modest for a man of Elon Musk's wealth. His primary residence in Boca Chica is a 375-to-400-square-foot prefabricated modular unit made by Boxabl that costs roughly $50,000, and he rents it directly from SpaceX, according to Gulf News. Boxabl itself has grown well beyond its origins as a curiosity tied to Musk's living arrangement; the Las Vegas manufacturer completed a public listing on the Nasdaq exchange in July 2026 at a $3.5 billion valuation, Hoodline previously reported, and the company recently signed a deal for 1,580 ranch homes in North Las Vegas.
Elon Musk's austere living choice stands in sharp contrast to real estate he has shed. A seven-bedroom Bel-Air estate he once owned was listed for sale at $49.8 million in July 2026, a figure that underscores just how far he has scaled down since pledging in 2020 to own no home. It is a pattern his mother has framed as consistent with a family culture built around work-site minimalism; Elon Musk has separately described sleeping on factory floors at Tesla plants in California and Nevada for three years during manufacturing crunches, per Business Insider.
Starbase Itself Has Grown Up Fast
The site where Maye Musk beds down in the garage is no longer just a launch facility. In May 2025, local voters, almost entirely SpaceX employees, voted 212 to 6 to incorporate the surrounding community as the City of Starbase, Texas, electing SpaceX executives to run its municipal government, as Hoodline reported in coverage of the vote that put SpaceX employees at the helm of governance. The fledgling city has since found itself in legal skirmishes over transparency, including a records dispute with Texas officials detailed in Hoodline's report on the company town's dispute with the state attorney general.
Maye Musk's own path to Starbase and the family fortune was hardly a straight line. Born in Canada, she raised three children largely as a single mother while working as a private dietitian, nutrition teacher, model and speaker, splitting time between South Africa and Toronto to support her family. She spent roughly 12 years on visas before gaining U.S. citizenship, then waited another five years for that citizenship to come through, working as a dietitian and model throughout. At 50, she moved to New York and began prioritizing modeling, eventually becoming a CoverGirl face and, in 2022, the oldest woman to appear in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition. She now lives in downtown New York City and says her seventies have been her best years yet.
A Family of Distinct Ventures Under One Public Story
Maye Musk's three children have each built separate public identities. Kimbal Musk, her younger son, co-founded The Kitchen Restaurant Group in 2004, sits on the boards of both Tesla and SpaceX, and founded the nonprofit Big Green, which builds schoolyard learning gardens, according to biographical details compiled by Vote Tesla. Tosca Musk, her youngest child, is a filmmaker and CEO who co-founded the romance-focused streaming platform Passionflix in 2017, according to background reported by the South China Morning Post. The family's financial foundation traces back further still, to Zip2, the web software company Elon and Kimbal Musk co-founded in 1995 and sold to Compaq in 1999 for $307 million, netting the brothers $22 million, as the Mirror has reported.
Maye Musk has said Elon Musk plays with his children and is lovable, funny and brilliant, recalling a time he told her he had been up all night designing rockets. But she has also acknowledged the toll of his becoming a political lightning rod: activists have called him a Nazi, threatened to bomb one of Kimbal Musk's restaurants, and smashed Teslas at dealerships. She has said she began tracking down reporters on X whose coverage of Elon Musk she considered unfair, adding that tagging them gave her comfort even though it did not stop them.
A Busy Book Tour Ahead
Timeless follows her 2019 book A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success, and she still prefers to handle her own social media and screen modeling and speaking opportunities herself, spending about four hours each morning on the task. In the coming weeks she plans to travel to Hong Kong, Austin, Buenos Aires and Shanghai as part of her book promotion. Asked how it feels at 78 to be juggling a global tour, a bestselling memoir and occasional nights in her son's garage, Maye Musk says simply that she is having the best time.
