Elon Musk says 'it's been raining money on fools for too long'

Workers must spend at least 40 hours a week in person, electric-vehicle maker’s CEO says 

Artwork: Emilia Tortorella

Workers must spend at least 40 hours a week in person, electric-vehicle maker’s CEO says
 

Elon Musk wants Tesla employees back in the office.

The electric-vehicle maker’s employees are required to spend at least 40 hours a week in company offices, the Tesla boss said this week in an email to staff that was confirmed by The Wall Street Journal.

“Tesla has and will create and actually manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth,” Mr. Musk wrote. “This will not happen by phoning it in.”

The email was earlier reported by Electrek, a site that covers electric-vehicle news. Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Employees who don’t want to return to the office could seek employment elsewhere, Mr. Musk suggested in a tweet. “They should pretend to work somewhere else,” he said.

They should pretend to work somewhere else

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 1, 2022

Mr. Musk’s hard-line stance on in-person work differs from much of Silicon Valley, where flexible work policies became commonplace during the Covid-19 pandemic. Tesla moved its headquarters to Texas last year, but much of its staff remains in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to the company’s first factory.

Mr. Musk said senior staff in particular should be visible to employees. He invoked his prepandemic experience sleeping on the floor of Tesla’s San Francisco Bay Area factory when the company was struggling with production in 2018.

Amazon.com Inc., which also has a mix of blue- and white-collar staff, said decisions about how much time corporate staff should spend in the office would be left to directors of individual teams.

General Motors Co. has told employees whose jobs don’t require them to be on-site that they can decide with their manager where they will work most effectively. Ford Motor Co. has a similar approach, allowing people who don’t need to be on-site to work flexibly.

Some employers that were eager to get people back to offices have reconsidered some of those plans as the pandemic has dragged on and workers have leveraged a hot labor market to demand more flexible schedules. Apple Inc. last month put a pause on plans to bring employees back to the office an extra day a week.

Some other CEOs have expressed similar sentiments as Mr. Musk, linking office presence to a commitment to work hard.

Mr. Musk has bristled before at how Covid-19 has affected the workplace. In the early days of the pandemic, when local authorities in California ordered nonessential businesses to close and people to shelter at home to stop the virus from spreading, Mr. Musk argued that the risk of panic over the coronavirus exceeded the risk from the virus itself. “Give people back their goddamn freedom,” he said.

He suggested in a tweet last week that he thinks workers have been slacking off at home. “Also, all the Covid stay-at-home stuff has tricked people into thinking that you don’t actually need to work hard. Rude awakening inbound!” he said.

Yes, but this is actually a good thing. It has been raining money on fools for too long. Some bankruptcies need to happen.

Also, all the Covid stay-at-home stuff has tricked people into thinking that you don’t actually need to work hard. Rude awakening inbound!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 27, 2022