Elon Musk Tells Tesla and SpaceX Workers to Return to Office 40 Hours a Week

Tesla, which had greater than 99,000 staff on the finish of final yr, has moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas, from Palo Alto, Calif., although it nonetheless has a important manufacturing and operational presence in California. SpaceX employs about 12,000 folks, Mr. Musk stated in a recent interview.

Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, stated Mr. Musk’s directives to staff at SpaceX and Tesla had been among the many strictest of tech firms. Many tech firms have as a substitute thought of hybrid fashions during which staff can make money working from home for a part of the time, he stated.

Mr. Bloom stated he anticipated SpaceX and Tesla to lose about 10 % to 20 % of their present work forces and for recruiters to strive to poach staff by providing jobs with extra versatile work choices.

Many Tesla and SpaceX staff who work in cutting-edge tech could imagine in Mr. Musk, however there are additionally folks “who are in more common activities like I.T., finance, H.R. and payroll,” Mr. Bloom stated. “They may say: ‘I’m not designing cars. I’m doing the payroll of employees, and I can do that somewhere else.’”

Annie Dean, the top of distributed work for Atlassian, an Australian software program firm, known as Mr. Musk’s view “outdated.”

“This mind-set is regressive and discounts the last two years of collaborative, digital-first work,” stated Ms. Dean, who was a former head of distant work at Meta, the proprietor of Facebook, in an e mail.

Mr. Musk has lengthy been generally known as a demanding boss. At occasions, he tried setting an instance for exhausting work, taking conferences late into the night time, sending emails in any respect hours and even sleeping on the Tesla manufacturing unit to assist ramp up manufacturing in 2018.