Tesla CEO Elon Musk is bucking the Silicon Valley trend of remote work and telling his employees they need to start showing up to the office or find a new job.
The billionaire Tesla boss, and aspirational Twitter owner, sent two emails to employees telling them that remote work is no longer permitted. The company, like many others, has allowed remote work during the pandemic, but now, it appears Musk has had enough of the trend. The subject line of his first email was “Remote work is no longer acceptable.”
“Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask of factory workers,” Musk wrote, according to copies of the emails obtained by Electrek.
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When a Twitter user posted a screenshot of one of the emails and asked for him to comment on people who perceive in-office work to be an antiquated concept, Musk responded that those people should just “pretend to work somewhere else.”
They should pretend to work somewhere else
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 1, 2022
The CEO said that exceptions would be reviewed and approved by him directly and that a return to the “office” means a main Tesla office and not a remote branch office unrelated to the employees’ job duties.
Musk further clarified Tesla’s new office attendance policy in a follow-up email with the subject line “To be super clear.”
“Everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week. Moreover, the office must be where your actual colleagues are located, not some remote pseudo office. If you don’t show up, we will assume you have resigned,” he wrote.
Musk said that the more senior an employee is within the company, the more visible his or her presence should be. The billionaire said that is why he has been known to sleep on the floor of Tesla factories so that his workers can see him working side by side with them.
Many employers have been reticent about a return to in-office work because of how tight the labor market is and how desperate they are to hang on to employees. A large number of workers have enjoyed the freedom that working from home entails, and companies have used the appeal of remote work as a lure when advertising job openings.
Some corporations have tried to mix remote and in-office work with hybrid models in which employees come into the office a few days per week and are allowed to work from home on other days.
Musk’s email acknowledged that other tech-heavy companies have been reluctant to compel workers to return to the office and took a jab at them for a perceived lack of recent innovation.
“There are of course companies that don’t require this, but when was the last time they shipped a great new product? It’s been a while,” Musk quipped. “Tesla has and will create and actually manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth. This will not happen by phoning it in.”
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The pandemic has been waning, and most coronavirus restrictions have been completely lifted as the country returns to normalcy. After peaking in January, new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have plummeted.
New infections are down 2% from two weeks ago, and deaths are down 6% for a daily average of about 300 per day, much fewer than the thousands per day that were tallied earlier in the pandemic.
