Work 40 hours a week or quit: Elon Musk wants employees to return to office, email goes viral

Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants employees to return to the office soon. On Tuesday, he notified his staff via email that remote working is no longer acceptable in the company.

The billionaire also said that employees who do not want to return to the office can leave the organisation. “Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask of factory workers,” Musk wrote in a leaked email that is now being circulated on Twitter.

If there are “particularly exceptional contributors” in the company who cannot work the minimum hours in the office, the tech billionaire said that he himself would review and approve their requests directly.

Check out the mail here:

#WATCH This film depicts Indian culture of respecting women & empowering women. A cultural awakening started in India in 2014, and it will again take India to the heights it was once at : Union Home Minister Amit Shah at a special screening of the film Samrat Prithviraj in Delhi pic.twitter.com/TmKZZDHYoa

— ANI (@ANI) June 1, 2022

Further in the email, Musk clarified that the “office” must be a main Tesla head office and not a remote branch office.

Meanwhile, Musk appeared to confirm his stance in the memo via a Twitter message, stating that employees who are unwilling to comply with the new rules should “pretend to work somewhere else”. However, he has not given any confirmation on the authenticity of the screengrab so far.

They should pretend to work somewhere else

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 1, 2022

This is not the first time when Musk is being tough on people who work under him. Weeks ago, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist Keith Rabois narrated a story from Musk’s start-up days that appeared to be in total contrast with the billionaire’s care-free attitude on Twitter. According to Rabois, the Tesla CEO once threatened to fire a group of interns who had gathered while waiting in line for coffee as he believed it was an affront to productivity.

In an interview in May, Musk praised China’s workforce for “burning the 3 am oil”. He said that people in the US were trying to avoid going to work.  In an interview with the Financial Times, the Tesla CEO asserted that there are a lot of “super-talented, hardworking people in China” who believe in manufacturing and won’t leave the factory until the work is finished but in America, people avoid going to work.

Keywords: Elon Musk, Tesla, WFH, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, Twitter, Elon Musk WFH