120 Hours

“You’re gonna go a little bonkers if you work 120 hours a week.”

Elon Musk: ‘You’re gonna go a little bonkers if you work 120 hours a week’, CNN Make It, Catherine Clifford, November 5, 2018

Elon Musk once slept at his Tesla plant a few years ago to help resolve production issues in an attempt to get those electric cars production ramped up, but he conceded that those kinds of hours are not healthy.

That was back around 2018.

Flash forward to 2022 and he extols the Chinese work ethic:

“They won’t just be burning the midnight oil, they will be burning the 3am oil, they won’t even leave the factory type of thing, whereas in America people are trying to avoid going to work at all.”

“Elon Musk praises Chinese workers for ‘burning the 3am oil’ – here’s what that really looks like”, The Guardian, Wilfred Chang, May 12, 2022

How quickly he has forgotten. Or maybe he never really cared about his workers as he could expend them and turn to the Chinese.

As workers and employers undergo a “battle” over where and when employees can work, some CEOs and billionaires are interjecting into the conversation, trying to sway the general populace to go back to work and possibly work more hours, a la the Chinese. The latest Elon Musk opinion is to have everybody back at work a minimum of 40 hours.

With his comments about the Chinese toiling until 3 am in the morning, I don’t think we should look to Elon for wisdom on how to treat people. He doesn’t come across as a great boss and lacks the empathy required to understand people.