Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk has long been critical of work-from-home situations.
In a recent interview with CNBC News, following Tesla’s 2023 shareholder meeting, Musk criticized the practice of working from home, describing it as “morally wrong” when service workers, such as people who work in factories, still have to show up in person.
Musk’s aversion to remote work is not new. Soon after taking charge of Twitter last year, he revoked the company’s “work from home forever” policy, which had been established by former CEO Jack Dorsey, and insisted that employees return to the office or leave the company. This decision followed a similar directive issued at Tesla a few months earlier, where Musk advised employees who preferred remote work to “pretend to work somewhere else.”
While referring to Tesla’s factories, Musk said, “Are people working from home here? Of course not. The people [that are] building the cars, servicing the cars, building houses, fixing houses, or making the food, making all the things that people consume — it’s messed up to assume that they have to go to work but you don’t. [Why] is that? It’s not just a productivity thing. I think it’s morally wrong.”
“The laptop class is living in la la land,” he said.
In response to declines in productivity and rising investor expectations, several executives at prominent companies such as Amazon and Salesforce have issued mandates for employees to resume working from physical office spaces.
In other Elon Musk-related news, X Corp., Twitter’s new parent company, has acquired Laskie, a startup company that helps employers recruit technical talent. Read more about it here.
