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Given what Elon has said about valuing people who work long hours and have an "extremely hardcore" work ethic, I can't imagine it's healthy to stay for too long

• FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  All big-tech CEOs would value people working long hours even if they wouldn't say that publicly. Elon is the only one saying the quiet part out loud that every big-tech CEO was thinking but never saying to avoid backlash. In a way, I value Elon more than the rest, since he has no filters, what you see is what you get, unlike the rest who are walking PR machines, saying one thing while meaning and doing another. The devil you know is better than the ones you don't.
  • tw04 1y ago
    So when he promises fully autonomous driving is going to happen this year, you believe him?
    • dep_b 1y ago
      They will take a very long year to finish it, with very long hours. These are not your kind of years, procrastinating underperforming you cannot judge.
    • GenerocUsername 1y ago
      A lot of big tech CEOs are promising full driving this year, they just don't have the cajones to say it. Elon is just saying the quiet part out loud
      • altacc 1y ago
        Except that in 2025 Elon Musk promised FSD in 2017. A lot of marketing delivers grandiose claims but Musk's are extraordinarily grandiose & unrealistic even by marketing's hyperbolic norm.
        • freejazz 1y ago
          I believe the post you're responding to is sarcastic.
        • ryandrake 1y ago
          There was a web site[1] that cataloged Every claim and prediction Elon Musk has made and how long it's been since he made them, but it looks like they stopped updating it. It was probably a huge amount of work since he makes ridiculous claims every day. 1: https://elonmusk.today https://elonmusk.today
      • salgernon 1y ago
        Where are they promising it then? Board meetings? I don't think lying (or creating unsubstantiated truthyness) is the same as saying the quiet part out loud.
  • krige 1y ago
    But Elon lies too, and frequently. Worse still, at least some his lies seem to be motivated by a childish need to score brownie points and/or worship from random internet users. His continuing claims of being a "top player" in online games spring to mind.
  • altacc 1y ago
    Social media and tech news is full of CEOs praising long hours, start up culture, hustle culture, putting success first or whatever euphemism they prefer. Musk is just on the extreme and in the public eye a lot. He's in the public eye because PR is one of his primary skills. He constantly says one thing and does another, just that his following is such that people believe him and do significant internal justifications and contradictions to do so. Musk leads the marketing hype of his companies, which consistently promise one thing and deliver another. He's doing the same with DOGE. Tesla FSD is not going to be delivered in 2017. Mars is not going to be colonized by 2050. Elon Musk lies, a lot, and a large number of people's identities involve celebrating each of those lies.
    • ethbr1 1y ago
      > [Elon is] in the public eye because PR is one of his primary skills. He constantly says one thing and does another Indeed. At this point, he's a real world manifestation of an Instagram influencer: 'You'll be wealthy with these 3 tricks!' (ignores thousands of hours off-camera or how money was really made)
  • damnitbuilds 1y ago
    I think there is a decent person inside Musk, I just hope his brother helps him find it.
  • feoren 1y ago
    "no filters", "what you see is what you get", "tells it like it is" has been said about a lot of pathological liars. I don't really get it. People said the same thing about Trump. There seems to be this thought that people who are saying extreme things must be telling the truth, and the rest of us are merely thinking extreme things but we filter it out. No, I am not thinking those things. I do not to apply some social filter to prevent myself from doing Nazi salutes. The reason I don't do Nazi salutes is that I have no desire to be a Nazi. He's genuinely just a liar and an awful human being. I'd much rather live in a world where the fascist lying sociopaths are under societal pressure to hide their true selves, rather than the one where they can openly do Nazi salutes and threaten to jail their political opponents. Give me the walking PR machine any day.
  • vonneumannstan 1y ago
    Its going to be funny to see the cognitive backlash when it comes out that Elon has a serious ketamine addiction and has essentially been a drug addled raving lunatic for the past half decade.
    • FireBeyond 1y ago
      I mean it's widely theorized that Trump eats Adderall for breakfast, lunch and dinner, too...
      • disgruntledphd2 1y ago
        > I mean it's widely theorized that Trump eats Adderall for breakfast, lunch and dinner, too... I have never heard this before, but it's an interesting perspective given some of his less coherent actions (tarriffs for you! Oh wait no, actually wait have some more tarriffs).
  • happytoexplain 1y ago
    I know decent people with no filter. But in the past decade, increasingly, phrases like "has no filter", "doesn't sugar coat things", "calls it like he sees it", etc, have come to be used simply as attempts to positively portray obnoxious, tribalistic, anti-social, antagonistic, mocking, disrespectful, superior, or petty behaviors (behaviors which, not coincidentally, are also up over that time period, especially in leadership). Also, your premise is flawed. CEOs get a lot of justifiable hate, and yes, many surely wish for employees devoted to the business, rather than proportionally devoted to each aspect of their life. However, there are also plenty of CEOs who genuinely don't want employees to work overtime. And Musk's attitude is arrogant/authoritarian even by the standards of less reasonable CEOs.
• dathinab 1y ago
  fun fact did you know that in EU way back in imperial times some of the worker protection rules where not introduced by angry workers by companies which realized that having well rested and healthy worker will long term produce much better results and then countries following up by enforcing it to boost their countries productivity (and internal stability)? (and yes I _very_ grossly oversimplified it including lumping all EU countries together even through they had very different inner political histories) The reason I'm pointing it out is because recently some people seem to be forgetting that at the core a lot of work protection isn't rooted in "being social/nice to your citizens" but in "having a more internal stable and international competitive" country.
  • damnitbuilds 1y ago
    And the European equivalents of Tesla and Spacex's sucesses are where exactly? Paypal? X even? I am totally not hardcore, I value my free time, but driving the staff like this seems to have worked very well for Musk's companies.
    • toomuchtodo 1y ago
      Paypal is not some monument of success (how much did Adam Neumann make from WeWork?), nor is X, he just bought Twitter by borrowing against his Tesla shares at an inflated valuation (inflated by sentiment and hype). Is he good at slave driving people who mostly care about mission? Yes. Does that mean it is what we want to optimize for at scale? I argue no. Important to be mindful what we are and what is worth optimizing for collectively and how that changes over time. If I drive my workers to various flavors (emotional, physical, etc) of failure to succeed economically, are you going to look up to me? If so, you've failed the litmus test. Progress is nice, but so is a reasonable balance for our short existence on this rock. Be Woz, not Jobs or Musk. (high empathy human, early TSLA investor, own Teslas, know people at SpaceX, etc)
      • damnitbuilds 1y ago
        You did not answer my question. If Europe wants to be "more internal[ly] stable and international[ly] competitive", then its 40-hour-per-week, 5-weeks-holiday-per-year companies have to compete with Tesla, Spacex, Paypal, X etc. And they are clearly failing to do so.
• dominicq 1y ago
  An idea I had (not sure if correct) is that many people have a similar amount of "work ethic", but distribute it differently. So, for example, person A can invest nearly 100% into their job and will be perceived to be "extremely hardcore", while person B might have the exact same absolute amount, but only allocate a fraction to their job, distributing the rest to other activities. This person will be "normal". Most people should limit the allocation to their job because they have very limited upside. Most entrepreneurs should allocate much more than employees because of less limited upside. I feel like many bosses want people to allocate more to a job, but don't offer the corresponding upside.
  • osigurdson 1y ago
    I think there are some companies / missions / bosses, who can clearly identify goals and a concrete strategy to achieve them. This, plus some equity, can really help set people's incentives in the right direction such that people want to put in more time and effort. On the other hand, a lot of companies don't offer either and seem to believe that simply rallying the masses to put in 20% more time (on average) will somehow lead to outsized gains.
  • reverendsteveii 1y ago
    >I feel like many bosses want people to allocate more to a job, but don't offer the corresponding upside. I agree, and I think that if you look back at the early dot com startups that did things like food, recreation, laundry and even housing right on-campus you'll see a culture that tried to actually meet that need in a way that doesn't seem unfair. The idea was "you give us everything you've got at work and everything else will just take care of itself". Then, as inevitable as death, came the investor class demanding more for less and eliminating the benefits with the hope that the sigma grindset would just perpetuate itself anyway.
    • ethbr1 1y ago
      But nobody can give you more time. Thread makes a good point that everyone should be evaluating their time investment in work vs. their potential upside, especially if they're sacrificing time to other aspects of life. (Relationships, family, travel, etc) Giving everything you've got with a potential huge reward = risky but possibly worth it Doing the same without a huge reward = you're a sucker, because your company is getting more from you than they're giving
• ferguess_k 1y ago
  I think the biggest problem is, 99% of the jobs out there is boring and meaningless, regardless of level and pay. I don't know about other people, but I can't really be "hardcore" unless I really believe in the work.
  • damnitbuilds 1y ago
    Even if I was programming Starship's flight computers, I would miss my family too much to work more than 40 hours per week. Regardless of really believing in their work, people want to have time with their loved ones.
    • ferguess_k 1y ago
      That's fair. Programming Starship's flight computers is definitely one hardcore job that I can sleep on the floor. I do have a family but this feeling of "in something, for something" beats everything else combined by one hand.
      • corrino1 1y ago
        [dead]
      • madeofpalk 1y ago
        I can't ever imagine "sleeping on the floor" for any job. Seems like an incredibly short-sighted and unsatisfying way to live your life.
        • ferguess_k 1y ago
          I get it, just different opinions I think.
      • vonneumannstan 1y ago
        How sad. I'm sure your kids will speak fondly of how you missed major milestones in their lives so you could help Elon land himself on Mars. Imagine the headstone "Absent father but hey he wrote a kernel that handled Starship's fuel mixing servos."
• thih9 1y ago
  Tongue in cheek, Elon said that he intends to move to Mars, perhaps we shouldn't expect that he'd care about Earth's QOL. On a more serious note, I see this as a net negative, both for employees and the company.
  • FireBeyond 1y ago
    Oh, I totally believe that that is his perspective. And he's entitled to that. The bigger issue for me is that he's making decisions, ignoring (and now "canceling") regulators who prevent or minimize the impact of decisions he makes along that line to protect our QOL. Because Musk sure as hell isn't bringing along anything up to 8 billion of us with him.
• lenerdenator 1y ago
  You'd think that the director of engineering would receive enough of the pie (read: equity) to make them consider staying. I guess it either isn't enough of a slice, or the slice wasn't going to be valuable enough to deal with Elon, which is really saying something.