Elon Musk tells Tesla employees to return to the office or quit

In an email to his executive staff, Tesla’s CEO said that remote work “is no longer acceptable.”

Photo by Patrick Pleul - Pool/Getty Images
Impact
Updated: 
Originally Published: 

You might have gotten the impression that Elon Musk had quit his job serving as the CEO of Tesla in order to shitpost full time, but it turns out the billionaire is still running the show, making arbitrarily cruel decisions and requiring employees to immediately comply. On Tuesday, an email from Musk was sent to his executive staff at Tesla informing them that remote work is “no longer acceptable” and that they can either return to the office or find a new job.

“Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) 40 hours per week or depart Tesla,” Musk wrote in an email that is the best advertisement for unionizing that anyone could ask for. His reasoning: Places that allow remote work don’t put out good products. Does Tesla? Hard to say, depends on if cars exploding into flames is a feature or a bug.

If Musk got one thing right here, it’s that the executives don’t deserve special treatment compared to the rest of the staff. But Musk has been pretty steadfast in his “no remote work ever” position. He’s knocked the prospect of work from home in the past. On Twitter, Musk replied to a tweet about the email saying that anyone who wants to work remote should “pretend to work somewhere else.” Most of them are probably fine with the latter, considering Tesla’s notoriously bad working conditions.

The good news for those who stay, though, is if you just follow the boss’s lead, it’s clear that you can just mess around on the internet all day as long as you’re in the office while you’re doing it.