Elon Musk has thoughts about work from home. Many, many thoughts.
The CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter shared them all in an interview with CNBC, leaving no doubt as to where his stance on working from home is.
“I’m a big believer that people are more productive when they’re in person,” said Musk, before bringing Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France, into the discussion. “The whole notion of work from home is a bit like the fake Marie Antoinette quote, “let them eat cake.” It’s like, really? You’re gonna work from home, and you’re gonna make everyone else, who made you car, come work in the factory (…) the people that come fix your house, they can’t work from home, but you can? Does that seem morally right? That’s messed up,” said Musk.
“People should get off their goddamn moral high horse with the work-from-home bullshit,” he concluded.
Musk continued comparing vastly different professions and situations throughout the short talk, saying that the “laptop class is living in la-la land.”
“It’s not just a productivity thing, I think it’s morally wrong.”
While he said he doesn’t expect all of his workers to have the same working hours as he does, Musk casually mentioned that he works “seven days a week” and claimed that there are only “two or three” days in a year in which he does not put in some “meaningful amount of work.”
Musk has pushed against work-from-home mandates which were instituted by many companies during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. In June 2022, he said that “remote work is no longer acceptable,” and started requiring Tesla workers to spend a minimum of 40 hours per week in the office. He did the same thing at Twitter after he acquired the company in October 2022.
