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Elon Musk says he sometimes sleeps on a couch in the library of Twitter's San Francisco headquarters

SpaceX owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk poses on the red carpet of the Axel Springer Award 2020 on December 01, 2020 in Berlin, Germany.
SpaceX owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk poses on the red carpet of the Axel Springer Award 2020 on December 01, 2020 in Berlin, Germany. Britta Pedersen/Getty Images
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Elon Musk has found a place to sleep at Twitter's San Francisco office. 

"There's a library that nobody goes to, up on the seventh floor. And, uh, there's a couch there, and I sleep there sometimes," Musk told the BBC during a live-streamed interview on Tuesday night. 

In November, Musk gave Twitter's workers an ultimatum: Go into "extreme hardcore mode" or lose their jobs. And in December, he turned some office space at the San Francisco headquarters into bedrooms. He also had one made for himself

Musk has, famously, slept in his workplaces before. He said in November 2022 that he wanted to inspire Tesla workers to give "their all" at work by demonstrating that their leader is not "drinking Mai Tais on a tropical island." 

"I was living in the factory in Fremont and the one in Nevada for three years straight," Musk said in November. "Those were my primary residences."

He added that sleeping on the floor was uncomfortable and made him "smell like dust."

In 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk was sleeping under his desk and camping at Tesla's factory in Fremont while the company was rushing to meet its target of producing 5,000 Model 3 sedans a week.

Musk told Bloomberg in 2018 that he slept on the floor because he wanted to, not because a hotel was unavailable.

"It was because I wanted my circumstances to be worse than anyone else at the company. Whenever they felt pain, I wanted mine to be worse," Musk told Bloomberg.

Musk talked about a wide range of topics during the interview on Tuesday. The topics covered included Twitter's content moderation, the company's mass layoffs, Musk's intention to turn Twitter's San Francisco office into a homeless shelter, and his dog Floki, who he jokingly calls Twitter's CEO. 

Musk and representatives for Twitter did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment sent outside regular business hours.

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Cheryl Teh
Cheryl is the senior news editor for Business Insider’s Asia bureau in Singapore. She and her team cover global business and tech news, including AI, consumer and workplace trends, and military technology. She frequently speaks to international media about top news stories — please email her for bookings.As a writer, Cheryl's interests include the business of nerdworld and K-pop. She covers crews such as Critical Role and Dimension 20, new releases in mobile and video gaming, and the artists, fandoms, and business trends shaping the K-pop industry.