- Elon Musk talked about his sleeping habits, including past nights spent on Tesla's factory floor.
- He said he wanted to show that he's hard at work and not "drinking Mai Tais on a tropical island."
Elon Musk opened up about his sleeping habits during the 29th Annual Baron Investment Conference in New York on Friday, highlighting the work culture he promotes at his companies as Twitter's staff undergoes layoffs and an around-the-clock push to meet newly imposed deadlines.
"I was living in the factory in Fremont and the one in Nevada for three years straight," Musk said. "Those were my primary residences."
He said he used to sleep on a couch in the factories, but moved to sleeping on the floor under his desk so his team could see him during shift changes. Musk said that sleeping on the floor was "damn uncomfortable" and made him "smell like dust."
Still, he said he wanted to show employees that he takes his job seriously and was not "drinking Mai Tais on a tropical island," with the hope that it would inspire them to "give it their all."
Musk's comments come days after a Twitter employee shared a photo early Wednesday morning of his boss Esther Crawford, the director of product management at Twitter, sleeping on the office floor. Crawford replied that her team was "pushing round the clock to make deadlines," which highlights Musk's demands for his new employees to work longer hours.
—Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) November 2, 2022
Musk has publicly talked about his sleeping habits in the past. In an interview with Bloomberg in 2018, Musk said that "The reason I slept on the floor was not because I couldn't go across the road and be at a hotel. It was because I wanted my circumstances to be worse than anyone else at the company. Whenever they felt pain, I wanted mine to be worse."
He has also criticized Americans for what he perceived as a weak work ethic, and praised Chinese workers.
"There's just a lot of super-talented, hardworking people in China who strongly believe in manufacturing," Musk told the Financial Times. "They won't just be burning the midnight oil. They will be burning the 3 a.m. oil. They won't even leave the factory type of thing, whereas in America people are trying to avoid going to work at all."