CEO’s Trailer Park: Tony Hsieh, Zappos Head, Lives In Vegas Trailer Park With Pet Alpaca


He’s worth an estimated $840 million, and with that kind of money, Tony Hsieh can buy anything he wants. However, the CEO of Zappos reportedly lives in a trailer park with his pet alpaca in Las Vegas, according to a Business Insider report.

Although one is led to think the company leader is down on his luck — after all, he lives in Sin City — there’s more to this story than meets the eye. Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay) is a 41-year-old Harvard graduate who has helmed the shoe and apparel company for 16 years.

He sold the company to Amazon for a whopping $1.2 billion in 2009, and CEO Jeff Bezos agreed to allow Hsieh to remain at the helm and run the company independently.

Then, came the extreme vision of “Holacracy,” a concept Hsieh embraced that allows everyone at Zappos to be on an equal playing field. Titles go out the door, and the self-management process is thought to foster innovation and increase productivity.

It’s still a work in progress, but it demonstrates his disruptive style of leadership. Now, it’s on to the CEO living in a trailer park.

Hsieh lives in Llamalopolis, a residential community he calls the anti-Vegas. It has rows of “silver Airstreams” that are rented out to “visiting computer coders.”

While it sounds like a strange choice of accommodations for a successful company CEO, this ambitious visionary has plans to breathe life back into downtown Vegas. Even before the housing crisis of 2008 that led to record foreclosures, the area was suffering from blight.

Tony Hsieh invested $340 million of his money into revitalizing the city. So far, some storefronts have popped up, but it’s far from where the trailer-park living CEO envisions the project.

CEO Tony Hsieh is known for shaking things up and thinking way outside the box. Back in May, the trailer park owner hatched a novel idea as part of a growth and customer service-driven strategy: Zappos would pay employees to quit, wrote Inquisitr in a previous report.

“Basically, the new way of running business nixes traditional managers and take away internal titles — making everyone equal. Hsieh knew there would be a number of people in his workforce who wouldn’t go for the change, so he gave them the ultimatum of getting out with three months severance pay and leave, or be on board with the new strategy. Essentially, Zappos was paying employees to quit if they so decided to depart because of Hsieh’s new way of doing things…”

CEO Tony Hsieh living in a trailer park makes perfect sense. Many refer to him as one of the most “frugal millionaires” in the United States. Erik Moore, an early shareholder with Zappos, weighed in on Hsieh’s approach to money.

“Money is just a way for Tony to get to his endgame. Money just doesn’t matter to him. If he only had a million dollars left, he’d spend $999,999 to make Vegas work. He would be just as happy with a dollar in the bank and being around people he cares about and care about him.”

[Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for CinemaCon]

Share this article: CEO’s Trailer Park: Tony Hsieh, Zappos Head, Lives In Vegas Trailer Park With Pet Alpaca
More from Inquisitr