The thing that makes working for Elon Musk exciting is the same one that makes it maddening
Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
- Elon Musk's tendency to work long hours is trickling down to employees.
- Some find the time scale on which he expects work done to be maddening.
- He asked employees to see how much of a project could get done if it was worked on 24 hours a day.
Elon Musk is a well-documented workaholic. He's prone to sleeping on the floor of his factories to get work done, and calling out employees when he thinks they are wasting his time in a meeting.
So it's probably no surprise that his penchant for working around the clock trickles down to his employees.
Rolling Stone reporter Neil Strauss followed Musk for nine months and offered an interesting anecdote on the issue. "Most maddening or exciting for Musk's employees, depending on which one you ask, is the time scale on which he often expects work to be done," Strauss wrote. He continued:
"One Friday when I was visiting, a few SpaceX staff members were frantically rushing back and forth from the office to the parking lot across the street. It turns out that during a meeting, he asked them how long it would take to remove staff cars from the lot and start digging the first hole for the Boring Company tunnel. The answer: two weeks.
"Musk asked why, and when he gathered the necessary information, he concluded, 'Let's get started today and see what's the biggest hole we can dig between now and Sunday afternoon, running 24 hours a day.' Within three hours, the cars were gone and there was a hole in the ground."
The scene seems reminiscent of what a former SpaceX employee said about his time working at the company.
"I frequently did work 12+ hour days and pulled many all-nighters at the office," former SpaceX employee Josh Boehm wrote in a post on Quora. "A phrase we threw around a lot was, 'You are your own slave driver.'"
- I spent $2,000 for 7 nights in a 179-square-foot room on one of the world's largest cruise ships. Take a look inside my cabin.
- Saudi Arabia wants China to help fund its struggling $500 billion Neom megaproject. Investors may not be too excited.
- Colon cancer rates are rising in young people. If you have two symptoms you should get a colonoscopy, a GI oncologist says.
- FSSAI in process of collecting pan-India samples of Nestle's Cerelac baby cereals: CEO
- Narcissistic top management leads to poor employee retention, shows research
- Audi to hike vehicle prices by up to 2% from June
- Kotak Mahindra Bank shares tank 13%; mcap erodes by ₹37,721 crore post RBI action
- Rupee falls 6 paise to 83.39 against US dollar in early trade