Elon Musk has ideas about working from home. Many, many thoughts.
The CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter shared them all in an interview with CNBC, leaving no doubt about his stance on working from home.
“I strongly believe people are more productive when they’re in person,” Musk said, before introducing Marie Antoinette, France’s last queen, into the discussion. “The whole notion of working from home is kind of like the fake Marie Antoinette quote, ‘let them eat cake.’ It’s like, really? car, come and work in the factory (…) people coming in to fix your house, they can’t work from home, but you can? Does that seem morally right? It’s messed up,” Musk said.
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“People should get off their goddamn moral horse with the work-from-home bullshit,” he concluded.
Musk continued to compare vastly different professions and situations throughout the short chat, saying “the laptop class lives in la-la land.”
“It’s not just about productivity, I think it’s morally wrong.”
While he said he didn’t expect all of his employees to work the same hours as him, Musk casually mentioned that he works “seven days a week” and claimed that he there were only “two or three” days a year in which he did not devote to a “significant amount of work”.
Musk has opposed the work-from-home mandates that were instituted by many companies during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. In June 2022, he said “remote work is no longer acceptable” and began requiring Tesla employees to spend at least 40 hours a week in the office. He did the same thing(opens in a new tab) on Twitter after acquiring the company in October 2022.
