Elon Musk has been a sleep-deprived workaholic since starting his first business. It's no wonder he supports strict RTO mandates.
Elon Musk has been a workaholic since at least 1995.
A new biography on the billionaire details his habits of frequently sleeping in the office.
Musk's obsession with work has likely informed his stance on RTO policies.
When Elon Musk launched his first business in 1995 alongside his younger brother, Kimbal Musk, overnight stays at the office, showers at the YMCA, and an abhorrent attitude towards work-life balance became commonplace for the world's richest man.
This singular bent towards a sleep-deprived, nonstop work culture, detailed in a new biography on Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, took shape when the entrepreneur started to run Zip2, a Palo Alto-based company that licensed city guide software to newspapers.
Though founders often go above and beyond to upend the industries they're seeking to disrupt, Elon Musk's ascent in the almost three decades since starting Zip2 has been marked by his obsession with working long hours.
Elon Musk's 'hardcore' approach coincided with a focus on RTO policies
According to Isaacson, the Musk brothers rented an unfurnished apartment a few months after securing their office, but it remained unfurnished as Musk spent "many nights in the office, crashing under his desk when he was exhausted from coding."
Jim Ambras, an early employee at Zip2, recalled that Elon Musk had no pillow or sleeping bag. "Once in a while, if we had a customer meeting in the morning, I'd have to tell him to go home and shower."
Though the Musks managed to receive a $3 million investment offer from VC firm Mohr Davidow Ventures early on, it resulted from a management strategy of being "contemptuous of the concept of work-life balance."
"At Zip2 and every subsequent company, he drove himself relentlessly all day and through much of the night, without vacations, and he expected others to do the same. His only indulgence was allowing breaks for intense video-game binges," Isaacson noted in the biography.
This kind of approach to work has stayed with Elon Musk throughout his career. It notoriously appeared most recently during his takeover of Twitter, during which he came to expect staff to work 84-hour workweeks and promoted a "hardcore" company culture — much to the dismay of some younger employees.
Musk's approach represents an extreme, however. Some companies, such as Goldman Sachs, are also pushing strict, full-time office policies, but many others, including Meta and Amazon, are promoting a more flexible RTO approach. The latter companies are still talking tough, though, when it comes to workers who want to stay fully remote.
Amazon told employees in February that it expected workers back in the office three days a week, but has threatened to fire people who don't comply.
Mark Zuckerberg's Meta updated its RTO policy last month too, threatening to fire workers who don't stick by its three-day-a-week rules.
Many of Elon Musk's employees excel in their roles but have little interest in pursuing a workaholic, "hardcore" lifestyle. His various workplace conflicts would be far less fraught if only their boss realized that.
Read the original article on Business Insider
