Working from home is the new normal, so why doesn’t Elon Musk agree?

When history writes the book on what work was like during the 2020s, there’s going to be one chapter that will dominate them all: the ongoing tug-of-war between employers and employees about returning to the office.

This intense game has been going on for at least half a decade now, but there are some new heavyweights trying their hardest to pull the rope in one direction and declare themselves the winner.

Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and Donald Trump.Credit: Various

Elon Musk and fellow American entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy were appointed this month by Donald Trump to lead the made-up ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ in the US.

Just don’t mention that it’s not an actual department, they are not government employees, and having two heads doesn’t scream efficient. What it does do, however, is spell out DOGE, a tired twelve-year old internet meme about a Shiba Inu dog surrounded by Comic Sans text.

Musk and Ramaswamy are unlikely bedfellows, united primarily by their fealty to Trump, and aim to use the pretence of DOGE to drastically cut back the size of the US Federal Government through executive actions instead of new laws.

One of their primary ways of doing that? Forcing all 2.2 million US federal workers to come back into the office every single day. Until now, each agency within the government has been able to choose their own workplace policy, resulting in roughly half of the total Federal workers being on-site all the time, and the rest choosing a mix of office and at-home working.

For the sake of history, let’s have a holistic, evidence-based debate that considers all sides of the issue.

“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” they wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week. “If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home.”

Now, let’s stop for a minute and interrogate what they are trying to do here. On the surface, their talk of efficiency is a noble aim, however instead of having an adult discussion about the merits of which type of work is best for workers, Musk and Ramaswamy want to use the return to office mandate as a blunt-force instrument to force workers to quit.

We are now five years on from the chaotic moment our companies sent us home with nothing but a laptop, an office plant and a hope at the start of the pandemic, and the hybrid way of working has woven itself into the fabric of our lives.

It is not a “Covid-era privilege”, it’s an evolution that recognises not all labour modes are equal. Whether they want to admit it or not, the way we are working has changed.

Elon Musk is also not the type of model employee that we should look up to. Yes, he’s been able to use his skills to build innovative companies, from Tesla to SpaceX, but he’s also sacrificed a helluva lot to get there.

He boasts he sometimes works 120 hours in a single week. “I go to sleep, I wake up, I work, go to sleep, wake up, work – I do that seven days a week,” he said last year. In a Tesla earnings call in April he added: “I work pretty much every day of the week. It’s rare for me to take a Sunday afternoon off.”

Musk has previously called working from home “bullshit” because not all employees have access to it, and demands that all of his workforces commute into the office and factory every single day.

He’s made more money than he could possibly need, and now wants to force his view of productivity onto millions of people via the US government, plus all the companies who will no doubt follow his example.

The open chapter on working from home is still being written, but do we really want it to be authored by a workaholic meme-lord who posts 150 times a day on his own social network and thinks working every waking hour is something to brag about?

For the sake of history, let’s have a holistic, evidence-based debate that considers all sides of the issue instead of treating it as just another political football.

Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com

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