By Senad Karaahmetovic
Elon Musk told Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) employees that “remote work is no longer acceptable” and that they must work at least 40 hours per week in the office or leave the company, Bloomberg News reported.
Tesla's boss joined the debate on remote work Wednesday on Twitter and sent an email to his executive staff, where he also wrote that the office “must be a main Tesla office, not a remote branch office unrelated to the job duties, for example being responsible for Fremont factory human relations, but having your office be in another state.”
Although the billionaire did not directly confirm that the email was authentic, he wrote a response to one of his followers who asked whether going into work is an obsolete concept. “They should pretend to work somewhere else,” Musk responded.
Musk’s stance on working from home does not come as a surprise given that he has shown a similar attitude towards his workers in the past.
Just two weeks before agreeing to buy Twitter (NYSE:TWTR), tech investor, and entrepreneur Keith Rabois tweeted a story from Elon Musk’s startup days. He said that back at Space Exploration Technologies, Musk saw a group of interns waiting in line to get their coffee, which he viewed as an affront to productivity.
Musk then threatened to fire all interns if something similar happens again and had security cameras installed to keep an eye on staff’s compliance.